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Comment by AlanSE | Hacker News Reader

That argument seems to violate the basic rules of exponentials. If an advanced species did settle on an stasis, then that will only last until some subset of the population decides to go beyond the stasis. Particularly for a space-faring civilization, the time scales and resources are so fast, that any multiplication factor beyond unity will eventually go bananas. Any individuals with the prerogative to multiply will swamp those who lack it, same with Earth evolution. The selfish gene will prevail unless there is centralized control.

I don't have any problem with this reading - advanced space-fairing beings have never existed in our light cone. SETI won't find anything because there's nothing there. We have a good chance of making it ourselves, but it's 50/50 because we have no priors, our decisions actually matter.

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I think the answer is pretty obvious, we are the precursor species.

Or it could be any number of things other than nobody out there. For example, advanced life could be out there but it might be rare enough that you only end up with a handful of space capable civilizations at any one time. The milky way is a big place. If we assume that ultimately there isn't a clever way around the speed of light then two civilizations on the opposite side of the galaxy will never encounter each other.

Or maybe its rare enough that you are only likely to have at a time in a galaxy.

Or maybe the prerequisite tech to thrive on an interstellar level means they simply aren't detectable by out primitive sensors. Poor backwards humans, still using the electromagnetic spectrum to measure things!

Hell, we could have a Prime Directive situation on our hands too. Although I think that one is really really unlikely.

or we are in a simulation

That doesn't really solve the problem because the simulation is (apparently) big enough to allow life to evolve. Why couldn't life evolve multiple times in a simulation?

Isn't the argument about simulation more about pondering the question "what is the fundamental nature of reality?", not "why is there life?". If you say that some beings are interfering with our simulation (either designing life, or preventing other life, etc...), that is just another word for god.

"Why couldn't life evolve multiple times in a simulation?"

Because the Grad Students don't want it to, and act to prevent it? :-)

Why would they bother making a sim that big if it was empty? Even No Man's Sky is full of cookie cutter creatures.

It's more of a psychological experiment, perhaps?

You don't actually make that big a sim.

You just fiddle with the render distance so the sims think it's that big.

It's another word for God even without interfering. There's still the Creator(s).

Maybe no one comes here because Earth is deep inside the Veil of Madness...

https://creepypasta.fandom.com/wiki/Mankind

Von Neumann pointed out that an advanced civilization, with technology that we can predict should be developable, can colonize the entire galaxy in roughly 10 million years.

Which is a blink of time by geological standards.

Von Neumann was much smarter than I but for such a calculation you have to make so many assumptions as to make it worthless. How can we possibly be able to predict what happens to a civilization in 10 million years?

And yes I am aware of Von Neumann probes. But as someone else pointed out there may be secondary effects we aren't even aware of.

> How can we possibly be able to predict what happens to a civilization in 10 million years?

Obviously under the assumption that no other changes but growth and colonisation happens to that civilisation.

Us being (one of) the first species is the most likely answer IMO. It violates the anthropic principle, but that doesn't account for everything.

By all estimates of the age and expected lifespan of the universe, we are extremely close to the beginning of all existence. We know that life takes an extremely long time to evolve, and life on Earth is young compared to the age of the system.

That we don't see a sprawling galactic civilization means one thing: there hasn't been enough time for one to emerge.

All the great filter arguments fall apart when you consider the nearly infinite nature of the universe. Given enough life supporting planets, at least one species would emerge, pass the great filters, and become large enough for us to observe.

That we don't see anything just means no one is there, yet.

Being alone in this universe would be terrifying and frankly untenable. Being first, however, is exciting.

I doubt that we are the first and only life in this universe, but it seems obvious that we are very, very early in the life of the universe, and we therefore are one of the first species to ask this question.

It violates nothing. Your intuitions are expanded at length here http://grabbyaliens.com

The anthropic principle would hold that we as a species and our circumstances of existence are entirely average and not at all special.

Being one of the first species, at the relative dawn of the universe is very special.

I'm not such a huge fan of the grabby alien model. It's internally logically consistent, but I think it's too rooted in human psychology. Plus I have serious doubts about the ability of any species to maintain a multi-planet empire, let alone a multi-system one. Barring something like a hive mind I suppose.

Ultimately it's just conjecture and we'll probably never know within our lifetimes.

we are extremely close to the beginning of all existence

This is the one that always causes me to wonder.

I was born in a major metropolitan area, which makes sense, statistically. I'm a native speaker of the 3rd largest language on the planet. That also makes sense. The 3rd largest country by population. Nothing out of the ordinary statistically speaking.

But to exist extremely close to the beginning of all existence

Huh? What are the chances that I, or any of us, would exist now? It's like being born on some island in the Pacific. Sure, it happens, but only to a few.

It really is nothing short of wondrous and awe-inspiring.

We could very well be one of the first species on the galactic stage, how absolutely awesome is that??

But in real life, it never actually is an exponential. There always is some limiting resource or saturation point or something, that turns it from an exponential into an S curve. An argument based on "the basic rules of exponentials" typically ignores second-order effects (there seem to always be some, even if we may not be able to see them in advance).

> that will only last until some subset of the population decides to go beyond the stasis.

You are assuming that they can go beyond the stasis. I'm not sure that's a valid assumption.

Well yes, after the distance to the our solar system’s other resources, the next pauses in exponential expansion would be crossing to the next star system, then the spaces to other galaxies, and then to other galaxy clusters.

There are not a lot of opportunities to saturate & stall once we sustainably develop resources beyond Earth

And stalls or extinctions due to conflict become very unlikely after we colonize a few systems

It never is truly an exponential in the limit, but exponential growth for surprisingly long times is very common.

There's no exogenous law that exponential trends continue indefinitely. In fact I'd argue it's much more common to see sigmoid behavior where eventually negative feedback loops cause a plateau.

> the basic rules of exponentials

A space-faring civilization cannot expand faster than O(n^2) because physics.

Yes, this is true but only from the reference frame of the cosmic background radiation. It is still possible that you can get O(n^3) from the reference frame of the aliens themselves, because time dilation makes travel fairly fast. You get into some spacetime philosophy about what metrics are worth evaluating O against in the first place.

OK, but even O(n^3) is still polynomial, not exponential. That matters. There's a reason that P=?NP is a thing.

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