Comment by Garvi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Garvi | Hacker News Reader

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I did some thinking on the Fermi paradox some time ago. I arrived at the following theory(I am probably not the first one), using these assumptions:

- speed of light(causality) cannot be practically broken / cheated

- current stasis technology theorizing is over-optimistic

- brain-computer interfaces are possible

- computational power/speed will continue to increase

I am assuming that some time in the future, a human will be able to process information 1000x faster than one is able to today, using brain augmentations anr/or brain-computer chip interfaces. This does effectively slow down our perception of time by a factor of 1000x (simplifying and ignoring inefficiencies of course). So if I lived in that time, and got diagnosed with a terminal disease and 1 year to live, I would spend my last year in VR, perceiving it as 1000 years.

Continuing that thought, I might spend my entire life inside VR, living a thousand lifetimes before my biological body gives in.

The galaxy might be full of life, but at a certain point in their development, they turn inwards, because it gives much bigger rewards (the first instinct of any life form is to survive for as long as possible).

The biggest flaw I find in my theory is the assumption they couldn't just VR on spaceships while they're exploring the galaxy anyway.

The biggest flaw in this and similar theories is that it requires 100.000000000...% of beings to decide this is the way to go. Not a single being or entity (corporation, or something more exotic) ever decides, over the whole life time of the civilization that, hey, if we send a space ship over there we can have an entire solar system of our own to play with. Including possibly entities constructed for the explicit purpose of doing that by other entities who do not themselves care. One must also consider that not every being is necessarily limited by our life span too; star travel is effectively impossible for us in our state, but if we casually lived 10 million years and could propagate that in space ships star travel would merely be a massive inconvenience. Plus civilizations can in principle live in denser areas.

This is a general problem across most kneejerk answers, like "humans just suck so hard that there's no chance that they'll make it out before they kill themselves". Possibly true. But to be an answer to the Fermi paradox, it must be the case that all civilizations have that problem, including ones based on insects with strong hierarchies and ones based on super-hippies and slower ones and faster ones and all the ones.

It isn't enough to explain 99% of the problem away, especially if it's done with explanations that aren't even necessarily that good in the first place. You need 100.00%, with several significant digits. (I used more in my first paragraph because that was per being, this one is per civilization.)

<pedant> no need for decimal points when specifying 100%. </pedant>

In this context:

100.0% means >99.95%.

100.00% means >99.995%.

100.000% means >99.9995%.

<pedant>Significant figures are important too.</pedant>

I think you can safely leave it at 99% or so if you assume a maximum "radius of effect" that a civilization could have over X billion years. If the limit of a civilization is, for example, on the order if 100 light years, then there could be several such civilizations in our galaxy without us noticing it.

Brain computer interfaces could be 1000 times faster than skin/eye/ear to brain but the speed of the brain is going to stay the same, right? No accelerated time, at least not much of it. Example: if you accelerate audio 1000 times you won't be able to understand it. Two times? OK, with some training. 1000 times faster video? It's a blur. 10 times? Maybe. Your reaction times to give inputs? The usual tens or hundreds of seconds.

I am assuming the "understanding" part would be accelerated as well. Either by enhancing or replacing it with artificial parts.

At that point you don't need stasis technology, just put your artificial brain in a robot and send it off at speed with an insert atmosphere.

> The biggest flaw I find in my theory is the assumption they couldn't just VR on spaceships while they're exploring the galaxy anyway.

Sounds a lot like the Bobs in the Bobiverse

I have a tangential thought similar regarding simulation theory, that perhaps there is no other aliens because we're the only one 'simulated', and the purpose of said simulation is because in order to train AI (we're already seeing this) an AI needs a physical body, of course a simulated physical body could probably suffice, it needs to be nurtured by a parent, and experience the world with all it's senses/sensors.

Perhaps we're just ai-babies, and when we're done here we move on to being ai-butlers to rich people in the 'real' world.

If we're a simulation then there's no reason why alien life couldn't also be simulated unless there's a specific point to our simulation that the presence of alien life would interfere with. If there's a point to the simulation we're all experiencing I have no fucking clue what it is.

This is basically what's described in Calculating God.

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