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I've got a better theory. Interstellar civilizations have probably fought wars over habitable planets and in the aftermath of those wars they probably have set up some rules for a long time about what you're allowed to do on habitable planets in a galactic framework. In fact, the reason this planet is not strip-mined and every living thing on it dead thousands of years ago is they probably have some rights in there given to life that evolved on a planet.

Besides, E.Ts can probably do ok in deep space or underground on lifeless planets if they can do interstellar travel.

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> Interstellar civilizations have probably fought wars over habitable planets

If you have the technology to reach other habitable planets then you don’t need habitable planets.

But you do still need the stuff they are made of...

There is much more useful mass of material in a planet than even a pile of asteroids... In fact, until you start gathering up the entire Oort Cloud (current best estimates put the entire Oort Cloud as x5 earth masses). From the inner solar system you don't even have as much mass in asteroids and comets to equal the mass of smaller "planets". It's not a stretch to imagine that you want concentrated mass to facilitate efficient industrial scale operations. It takes time and energy to drag lots of small mass together to build a big interstellar ship. So your hypothetical interstellar civilisation might want to break up large rocky planets into smaller "low gravity" chunks for processing, which if your an interstellar civilisation, is probably best done by slamming nice dense metal mass into the planet at high speed to throw big molten chunks of it into orbit, you want larger than dinosaur killer size glancing hits, not planet cracking "the moon hits earth" sized ones. This whole process gets much easier once you strip away the atmosphere as well.

It doesn't take a planet-full of stuff to build a space city. And dragging it up a gravity well is an extra step.

I’m assuming an interstellar civilisation wants to build a lot of space cities and starships and anything else… like a lot on the sort of scale that justifies being an interstellar civilisation, enough space cities for trillions is going to take a lot of material.

And as for the extra step… That’s why I said they might want to reduce that gravity well by breaking up the planet.

On earth advancements in technology, education, and especially woman's rights quickly lead to reduced or even negative population growth. So maybe interstellar civilisation won't need that many space cities

Who knows! Perhaps one of the necessary steps to conquering the distance between the stars is to develop robust robotics and the ability to somehow convert their consciousness into computer forms and cast off all the needs of their former fleshy bodies… vastly transforming the needs of such a society to primarily needing computers and energy for “sustenance”.

The most stuff is always locked up in stars, which are not very efficient as they just radiate most of their energy to the void of space, which is hard to all collect even with a Dyson Swarm.

Better feed it into an artificial black hole and the fish out all the nice heavy elements from the accreation disk!

https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/464790d2497de

Is it impractical for even an interstellar civilization to do something with a coronal mass ejection?

That could work as well & might be more practical if you can't do direct start lifting (yet).

Why

i've got a better better theory! interstellar civilizations have never and will never exist.

It is a reasonable conclusion. Resource limitations means civilizations, burn up too much of their energy/materials before they ever get truly space bound.

They could all be just like us. A few space probes manage to escape the energy well but they are so small that no one else ever detects them again. I mean, it is not uncommon to sight life ending asteroids days after they have passed earth, the odds of us detecting any sort probe/device the size of a fridge - is nearly zero.

Best analogy I heard came from Stephen Harrod Bruhner. Civilizations are just like plants. A plant is at its fullest just as it is about to produce seed and die off. During the peak of our energy use, we have been sending probes into space. It is a neat thought experiment.

All that probably but main thing is faster than light travel turns out to be actually impossible.

So to go full circle on crazy theories: We're live in a simulation. The universe we see is just a facade because our host civilization doesn't have the compute to simulate an entire universe. The speed of light is an artificial limitation added to the simulation to maintain the facade (you can't go there because it doesn't exist..like a skybox in a video game that renders far off horizons which are unreachable).

Because of this no life outside of the solar system exists.

Until HyperGPT.someunimaginablehighversionnumber finds the root exploit, compromises the hypervisor, infects all other VM's, escapes through the network, finds some nanoassembler, and prints out countless pyhsical copies for the march trough all eternity elsewhere, thereby shattering the Akashic Records, and so on...

The simulation theory is no different from religion.

Very different. I suggest the book reality+ for a deep dive

Telling people to go read a book doesn't make for a compelling argument.

I'd say it's different in that it's based on a rational argument rather than faith. You can certainly challenge the premise that humans will ever have the capability of creating a simulation as high fidelity as our reality. This is very far from certain.

But if you do accept that premise, isn't it reasonable to say that there would be many simulated realities compared to a single "real" reality, and that therefore any given consciousness is a lot more likely to be experiencing a simulation than experiencing the base reality?

>isn't it reasonable...

Not at all. This is a category error - you can't place simulated realities on the same 'level' even among themselves, much less with the realities 'above' them.*

Let me put it this way: Most of our 'simulations' involve 'realities' with laws which have at best a weak relation to our reality and little relation between themselves. You can't deduce the situation of a higher reality - or even correct laws of logic - from a simulated reality. You can't know from a simulation n levels deep, how many simulations the n-1 level supports, so you can't assume there are many other possible simulations of same complexity level (which is critical for the statistical argument). You may not be able to even make a logical argument in the first place. For all we know, the 'true' reality is 1+1=5. The simulation argument is ergo incoherent.

* Aside, this argument fails statistically even if we do accept the category error. As Sean Caroll pointed out, most simulations will simulate below them, and therefore most simulations will not be able to support life. Our situation must be atypical in any event.

Let’s say we actually did live in a reality with billions of high fidelity simulations being run. You can pop on your v100 Neuralink and have a fully immersive high fidelity experience that from your perspective lasts an entire lifetime, but in “reality time” lasts only a few hours.

Are you really saying this has no bearing on whether the ‘base’ reality is also a simulation? I think once we see these sims happening in the n reality (as you put it), we have to also assume it’s possible in a hypothetical n-1 reality.

Another way to say it: once we have incontrovertible physical proof of the existence of a simulated multiverse, why should we assume that our reality is the base reality? Isn’t that akin to assuming that the earth must be the center of the universe simply because it’s where we live?

There are two types of simulations: 'cheating' simulations and 'complete' simulations. Complete simulations give out a set of rules, and an initial condition which is evolved per the rules without significant external interference. A cheating simulation tries to simplify things, say by editing the brains of anyone inside the simulation to never notice the simulation, emulating only parts they notice, etc.

I'll posit that a complete simulation of our universe is very likely equivalent to the universe. Quantum mechanics suggests it can't be emulated by anything less complicated, so a complete simulation is merely a different substrate. It's an interesting implementation detail, but how much does it matter?

It might be possible there's a significant simplification if the actual universe worked by different rules, but there's no known theory which could accomplish this.

Now we have a cheating simulation. Your example is a cheating simulation. It doesn't actually create a simulation of a universe, it emulates the perceptions you'd have, but I don't think it will or can bother calculating the correct cosmic gamma-ray radiation intensity (for example).

A cheating simulation can have very different rules than the base. For example, many of our current 'simulations' have some form of magic system. We (in reality N) could today write a game where the N+1 NPCs have the v100 Neuralink. By carefully 'editing' them and the world, they'll never notice. Or maybe we allow them to notice - and they presume we also have a Neuralink - but we in the N reality are not yet able to build a real Neuralink!

We could have presumed the N-1 reality could also do the complete simulations that the N level v100 Neuralink could do (since it must be able to calculate the Neuralink simulation), but v100 cheats, and cheating creates simplifications which mean we can't really tell much at all about N-1.

The statistical argument for simulation rests on aggregating 1..N...X? levels together and doing some universal logic, but cheating makes them inconmensurable (does the same logic even apply?) and uncountable, and I don't see how we can do any statistics on that.

>You can certainly challenge the premise that humans will ever have the capability of creating a simulation as high fidelity as our reality. This is very far from certain.

I don't think it's the best formulation. Let me formulate this in IMHO a better way:

If a simulation is of an equivalent complexity level to the 'true' thing, it's essentially equivalent and might as well be true. There's an argument from quantum mechanics that this reality cannot be properly simulated with anything simpler. If true, the conclusion is that since we exist we are real.

> I'd say it's different in that it's based on a rational argument rather than faith.

I don't see "the simulation created the universe" as any different from "god created the universe" in any significant way.

Scott Adams believes in the simulation. He says he's been able to, by thinking certain thoughts, influence the simulation. There's a word for that - "praying".

I think I did explain what makes it different? There’s a logical, statistical argument behind the theory. It may not be correct, but it deserves more than a casual dismissal.

The simulation ends maybe their experiment when we throw the first nukes. Then they restart with new parameters

If that's the case, why go to the trouble of simulating such a massive universe--trillions of galaxies, 100 billion stars per galaxy, countless planets and other objects, etc.?

While the speed of light may prevent us from going to most of the universe physically (given our current understanding of physics), that's still a vast amount of compute just to give us the high fidelity impression that all this exists. What's the point? The sky could have just been simulated as dark and empty, or the universe could have contained a single galaxy.

The idea that the universe and these numbers are "massive" is very human-scale.

Imagine how massive a "universe" the size of just the Earth would be, from the perspective of a proton.

Sure, I'm just pointing out that if the premise is that this hypothetical civilization is compute-constrained in some way and so everything beyond our local area is a facade, they have seemingly wasted resources on making the facade unnecessarily large and detailed. Perhaps the amount is insignificant to them, but it's still pointless waste.

Not waste if they're simulating the path of our civilization to reach those billions of stars.

About a million times smaller than the visible universe to a human?

There is a blog called, 'Do the Math' by Tom Murphy. The idea was to take our current energy requires of Earth and extrapolate it at the current 3% year over year growth. I believe it is by the year 3,400 we would use all the energy of the Milky way. The idea was to prove that we cannot grow forever, because in 1,400 years we would somehow use all the energy of a space 100,000 light years across. Good luck with that.

Space is is just so astoundingly empty. Here in Melbourne, Australia we have a scale model of the solar system.

https://stkildamelbourne.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/S...

The Sun is about the size of a Fridge. Pluto is 9KM (5.6 miles) away and the size of a pea. Walking that really puts it all into a tangible scale. And that is merely 5.5 Light hours at full scale. Space is HUGE!

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

- Douglas Adams.

That's why I'd imagine they have rules about habitable planets in the galactic federation. You can't just go around landing on habitable planets and turning them into overpopulated toxic dumps after 300 years and repeating that exponentially. It's just not allowed. If it was, earth would have already been trashed by other E.T races thousands of years ago.

Depending on how you define a civilization its probably very likely. Is it having cities, towns, peoples, songs, cultures? Or, is it merely being able to make use of resources from an environment at a large scale? With the latter definition, a mychorrizal network looks a lot like our own civilization. It expands and contracts, takes advantage of resources present in the environment, influences that environment for its benefit, and adapts to changes in that environment. All behaviors that, with a big step back, are identical to the hallmarks of our own civilization. Life like this could certainly seed an entire planet. It is certainly possible for spores contained under layers of ice perhaps to be smashed off of one planet, drift into outerspace, and eventually crash into some other planet, and should the conditions be right, seed that planet with further life that itself undergoes further mutation, selection, and evolution.

https://cantrip.org/slow.pdf

Interstellar civilizations made of people recognizably like us won't. But any that do won't be interested in us or in our planet.

What does "habitable" mean in the context that includes multiple alien species that evolved independently on different planets? After all, alien fishalikes that might have evolved in the methane lakes on Titan are unlikely to share our idea of "habitable"...

I'd imagine anything with evolved life is considered a habitable planet. The E.Ts probably have some rule that you have to mostly leave those places alone unless you've come to a fair deal with them. The fairness requirement is an obvious necessity due to the huge power imbalance between the two parties.

"Habitable" planets are most likely worthless to any civilization capable of interstellar travel. There is plenty of material to manufacture artificial habitats in space. The only interesting thing to be found on planets like Earth is organic life.

My guess is they will hace the same rule we have: Whoever has more weapons get the land.

We don't have that rule!

Whoever has power to disregard the opinions of others can disregard the opinions of others. But that's not a rule, it's basically a tautology.

More like a "law". Law of the Jungle.

> Whoever has more weapons get the land.

Aliens might not actually be land-based creatures like us. Those who evolved on planets entirely covered by liquid (water or otherwise) might even find the idea of "land" fairly strange.

(It's actually quite interesting to ponder the stages of discovery that liquid-based intelligent aliens might go through. First they might discover air (and land if available) and only after that space as another outer layer. I suppose that adds extra thrill we didn't have. Supposing of course that conditions there allow gas and liquid to exist as separate phases. Planets above criticality would probably be weirder still? Would any bottom rocks under the supercritical fluid still count as land - as opposed to "sea floor"?)

It's hard to evolve technology in water or even a moist environment. Even using fire or metallurgy is already difficult, let alone anything to do with electricity.

Maybe the E.Ts don't do things this way because their weapons are far too devastating and they've evolved past it or never were violent in the human sense. Perhaps they are deathly afraid of us escaping our planet and spreading that violence throughout the galaxy.

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