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Comment by dbingham | Hacker News Reader

As someone concerned about resource usage on Earth, it seems to me that the absolute last thing a super advanced civilization would do would be the galactic equivalent of strip mining or mountain top removal. I would think a civilization would have to develop more wisdom about how it interacts with and uses the natural world to even reach a stage where it could consume resources in that scale, and by then it would know better.

It's actually quite comforting that we didn't seem to find any "type 3" by this definition. If we did, that would be a civilization with no respect for life beyond its own, and thus, would be one to fear.

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The enigma is that if civilization is common, we should see evidence of mass colonization even if only a single "spreader" civilization developed. Among the millions of civilizations out there, are we assuming that none of them were expansionary?

The conclusion: civilization is uncommon OR we are unable to detect civilizations for some reason OR there is something intrinsic about civilization that prohibits the development of "spreaders".

I might go with option that interstellar spreading is just impossible. There might not be ways around physics and sufficient energy budgets might not just be possible.

Or maybe it's just too impractical. Communication alone is a pretty compelling argument against "galactic civilisations". If the speed of light is indeed the ultimate limit for information exchange, then it would be completely pointless to have a "colony" more than a handful of light years away.

It'd be practically impossible to even just have a meaningful information exchange between worlds that are hundreds or even thousands of light years apart. Trading goods would be useless - it'd take thousands of years for a one way trip. Messages would be obsolete the moment they're sent, because the receiver would only be able to detect them after hundreds or thousands of years.

All those fantasies rely on FTL or basically unchanging civilisations that stagnate for aeons.

Also, wouldn't any type of generation ship be culturally resource constrained, maybe not energy, but at least in all meaningful raw materials. As such the initial start might be expansionist, but the spawns would have spend long time with very real limits, likely in all aspects of normal living. And with communication being what it is, they might be extremely unhappy about being sent away too...

If space travel were performed only by robots (and really, why would anyone do it any other way) then large scale “colonization” need not even make sense: the robots could travel around at sunlight speed doing whatever research is of interest to the aliens and gathering whatever resources are needed for people on or near the home planet. “People” might have long enough lifespans that the time taking by the robots to travel around might not feel significant, especially as it would mostly be happing in background.

Do you think in 100,000 years we'll still have big meat bodies, and all the massy trappings of civilization that come along with that?

I think it's the destiny of all intelligent life to merge into the ether and that happens in the astronomical blink of an eye after industrialization.

The expectation that any truly advanced civilization is still primitive enough for us to see is likely the flawed assumption here.

Strip mining gravitational wells is a dumb thing anyway used for ali n invasion plot devices.

There's probably plenty of resources for even extensive interstellar civilizations in asteroids.

Once you can cart around a solar system pretty easily, it's probably far less resource intensive to mine Asteroids and not have to deal with gravity wells, atmospheres, and chemically reactive environments.

If you dropped in the solar system needing rare earths would you conquer humanity, extract the resources from our metal poor crust, and drag them up to orbit, or park your ship next to that asteroid with sixteen quintillion dollars of rare earths?

Even mercury or a host of moons would be far easier.

And if you had sufficient technology and time, couldn't you well just blow up the planets, wait for sufficient time and comeback to collect resources. Planets are inefficient in mass to surface ratio anyway...

If you can do everything in space, why even bother with planets anymore.

The Kardashev scale is most likely a misconception anyway: the factor representing capability is power density, not total energy.

It is useless to generate huge amounts of power thinly dispersed over galactic scales.

A society capable of high power densities, like direct energy-conversion fusion for starters, can realize fantastic feats, as opposed to somebody collecting sunlight over vast volumes of space, but lacking adequate portable storage.

On the other hand it could also mean that can civilizations never reach that stage and there is still a great and possibly even final filter a head of us.

Or we ourselves are a filter, destroying any form of intelligent life that could do anything different before it can evolve so, before our own self-destruction. Maybe we have already done it and we do not even know it.

Or, civilizations have become so advanced they mastered higher dimensional movement and are now occupying positions in time and space that we cannot see, and no matter where we hide they can always see us without being detected.

Organisms competing with other organisms is what has created intelligent life. I think more of that competition would only lead to even more intelligent life.

At a very large scale, changes like a mountain removal or temperature increase of a few degrees are fully negligible. Even humanity should be able to reverse those if it decided to actually do it. Will we actually do so? It's not too likely.

That's like saying increasing the internal temperature of a steak is a negligible change at a very large scale. You can't uncook a steak.

But growing another cow is straightforward.

might only need to grow the steak.

It's possible that advanced civilizations actually become more energy efficient over time. I'm thinking about how cities are much more energy efficient per capita than less dense environments.

Most of a galaxy would be lifeless. A super civilization could terraform millions of planets and moons. It could convert other matter into digital simulations.

> where it could consume resources in that scale, and by then it would know better

It must be a special case of overconfidence to believe to know what a supercivilization would consider "better".

I think it makes more sense that very advanced aliens would live in VR paradises they created. Anyone who has read Diaspora by Greg Egan knows what I am talking about.

I’ve been confused about the natural resources concerns. There have been false alarms about this in the past.

Could you give me an idea of what current concerns are? I haven’t kept up on this.

Freshwater, sufficient land devoted to biodiversity and a functional species food web, topsoil erosion, meat production scaling for carbon and necessary feedstock land.

Simply consider the scaling involved if China and India want US style resource conservation per capita.

China in India are roughly 10 times the amount of people as the US.

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