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Comment by bratbag | Hacker News Reader

As far as I remember, the likelihood of a technological civilization forming before us is rather small.

Basically we live in the goldilocks zone of our galaxy.

Stars further towards the center are being constantly bombarded by types of radiation that make the formation of structured self-replicators almost impossible.Entropy rules.

Stars further towards the rim have not yet gone through enough generations to produce the abundant heavier elements needed.

We live in the zone that is both old enough and stable enough for technologically adept life to thrive, and we turned up on the scene about as early as we could.

So we are probably just one of the first.

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There are almost endless modes where life could develop in much more different and harsher conditions. More radiation? Well stronger magnetic fields for those. Too much space debris randomly popping into star systems? Have a big vacuum cleaner like Jupiter or two (or five). Not that common but if you have 500 billion stars many unprobable things can and will happen.

Life as we see here on Earth is extremely adaptable. Give it harsh environment, and unless its too much immediately it will adapt and actually take advantage out of it (ie too much radiation? well we can mutate to our ideal desired form even quicker).

Also, 1 billion years doesn't mean much in this cosmic scale. But imagine if civilization like ours had that much headstart. Well, you can't imagine, and neither can I in same way homo erectus couldn't imagine CERN particle accelerator or black holes.

It's an even bigger gap than that.

Homo Erectus takes us back around 100 million years. A billion years gets us to very simple multicellular life which can't do imagination at all. Or logic. Or thinking. Or creativity. Or much of anything else.

So... a billion year old civ is going to have very fundamental abilities which are completely beyond our comprehension.

It's like Dunning Kruger on a cosmic scale. Except that with Dunning Kruger there's usually some potential to learn a way out of ignorance.

Here there isn't. Not only can we not do it, or understand why we need to do it, we can't see - never mind reach - the first rung of it.

> So... a billion year old civ is going to have very fundamental abilities which are completely beyond our comprehension.

Maybe not. There's no evidence that species can continually adapt and evolve to higher levels of intelligence. Humans are already hitting limits for how much we can think, figure out, etc.

But by that same token, maybe so. Humans aren't exactly the cream of the crop when it comes to higher critical thinking and emotional intelligence.

Is there any biological research that takes a look at a single or sequence of species maintaining civilizations lasting x amount of years?

Natural evolution may have its limits, but we don't yet know how much we can improve by artificial means.

We will have the technology to alter the DNA to increase our intelligence significantly. There are limits, but I don't think it is likely that human beings are at the peak of what is biological possible.

- When we reach the biological limit, we may extend ourselves by merging with technology. Our brains might be connected to a computing device that amplifies our capabilities. It may be so seamless that when answering a question, you won't notice if the knowledge was stored in your physical brain or retrieved from a central archive.

>- When we reach the biological limit, we may extend ourselves by merging with technology.

In the near term, I just wish they'd figure out how to make better mechanical parts for humans. Our natural joints suck, particularly knees and ankles. It really shouldn't be that hard to make mechanical replacements for various parts of the human body.

> Humans are already hitting limits for how much we can think, figure out, etc.

There is zero evidence of this.

What would that mean?

Once our intelligence encompassed communication then it began growing culturally. I.e. we are able to treat math and engineering as no biggies, despite humans needing millennia to realize "nothing" could be a number called "zero".

It's fair to say the 21st century shows no signs of intelligence slowing down. We keep finding ways to think more simply but more effectively.

>Homo Erectus takes us back around 100 million years.

Huh? Where did you get that crazy number? 100M years ago was the age of the dinosaurs. Homo erectus was around somewhere between 250K and 1.6M years ago.

He probably meant 100 thousand years.

> and we turned up on the scene about as early as we could.

> So we are probably just one of the first.

Those two sentences don't really mix. We have evidence that points to life forming basically immediately once the conditions are right. That means that for us to be the first, nowhere else in the galaxy and universe could have had the conditions. That just seems incredibly unlikely. Even in our own Solar System, other bodies like Mars had the conditions for life before Earth did.

On top of that, Earth itself had the potential for intelligent life long before humans came around. But instead of evolving some overgrown monkeys, it evolved some overgrown birds who were too selfish and shortsighted to work together and develop a space program and watch out for large asteroids. They were mostly wiped out because of this, and it took 65 million years for another selfish and shortsighted group of animals to evolve and become dominant. Unlike the last ones, they developed a space program, but it's not really enough to handle threatening asteroids yet, but they're busy destroying themselves and their environment in other ways, so it may be moot. It might take Earth 3 tries to finally evolve a sentient species that becomes a spacefaring civilization.

With you until the last sentence. Why would the "third try" not just be dinosaurs again? Same for the 4th, 5th an subsequent "attempts". The fact that the second try got further than the first does not mean that the 3rd will get further than the second.

In fact, given that most of the easily accessible coal and oil deposits will have been used up it might even be much more difficult for a subsequent species to get as far as humanity has. (Although that might be balanced a bit by lots of the metal ore being pre-mined and near the surface)

> ... most of the easily accessible coal and oil deposits will have been used up .

There'll be plenty of time for nature to compact and bury much of the biomass from the previous sentience attempts.

Depends. Most of the current coal deposits were from before fungi and bacteria evolved the ability to digest lignins and similar compounds. Now that they can do that, no more (or at least much less) coal deposits are being created.

Some ongoing research into this timeline: https://www.science.org/content/article/some-dinos-may-have-...

Orcas very likely have human adjacent intelligence and evolved earlier than humans. They arrived several to tens of million years before humans, as far as I can tell. Orcas are simply constrained by their environment as far as technological development goes.

Or it means that the conditions are not persistent -- life originates in a stellar system either immediately, or not at all.

> We have evidence that points to life forming basically immediately once the conditions are right.

What's the evidence for this? Not asking rhetorically, I'm curious and want to read more.

I have picked it up from a variety of resources. One is the Origins of Life course on Complexity Explorer: https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/155-origins-of-li...

Basically, as my understanding goes, life is effectively as old as the Earth is. As soon as it cooled down after forming and had liquid oceans, life started, which happened just a few hundred million years after Earth formed.

There is the book Every Life is on Fire as well, describing how life began to dissipate heat in the environment of molecules in water being heated. That seems to imply life will quickly start in such conditions. (Note: I don't strongly recommend the book, as it has a lot of religious stuff in it and honestly isn't that well written, and I have mainly learned about the author's theory elsewhere.)

> So we are probably just one of the first.

We don't really have any way to know that. Considering that there may be as many stars in the sky as grains of sand on Earth, there are many many unknowns.

For another example we don't know for sure if our universe is the only one and it's entirely possible that everything that could ever happen plays out in real time across and infinite number of universes. We don't have any way to physically measure that possibility yet. We only have mathematical theories.

Similar to how Copernicus proposed the heliocentric model, maybe our universe is not even the center of existence?

It is humbling to imagine.

All those stars you see in the night sky? That’s an astronomical waste of energy. No technological energy limited civilization would let that waste continue, entirely unhindered.

The fact that we don’t see the light of stars, or whole galaxies replaced by dim infrared waste heat emissions means either (1) new physics will point to free energy solutions that circumvent thermodynamic laws [unlikely], or (2) we are the first.

or 3) the assumption that advanced civilizations consume more energy is wrong.

Or 4) - interstellar mega-engineering is impossible, or essentially impossible, or it's ROI is negative.

Which seems to be the most likely explanation to me.

The really advanced civilizations developed their technology just enough so they could build a really safe and reliable Matrix to live out their lives in.

They would still consume their local stars to extract and store the energy so their matrix can survive for trillions of years, rather than a few million or billion.

We may not have the capability to build a Dyson cloud around our own star (yet), but we do already have the technology. You could do so with 21st century tech, and the ROI would be positive.

Even then, there are two issues:

1. disassembling the stars to make them live a thousand times longer

2. it only takes one expansionist civilisation seeking interstellar exponential growth — even if 99.9% of civilisations are quiet, that's just 3 digits of the 22-digit number of stars in the observable universe.

> disassembling the stars to make them live a thousand times longer

Why would they do that when there are insane amounts of start with billions of years of life ahead of them. What purpose would that serve at this point in time?

Even though the numbers are too big for humans to feel them out, the bigger one is bigger than the smaller one.

Because trillions is bigger than billions.

That was (1) new physics. Because otherwise, entropy is a bitch.

Already today, having passed peak-child a few years ago, we can see that there are futures possible where humanity doesn't grow. I.e. humanity might be fine advancing with a fixed amount of power.

In that case, the stars are not 'waste'.

Historically, this idea of growth as method for advance is only a few centuries old. It's not hard to see its end as efficiency keeps increasing.

That'll change once we solve disease and aging.

Or just maybe civilizations advanced enough for Kardyshev level 2 engineering feel no need for exponential expansion. Fermi paradox is essentially Malthusianism extended to outer space.

If nothing else, eventually civilizations are confronted by questions (in math, say) that can only be solved by extremely large amounts of computation. We know there must ultimately be succinctly stateable problems that cannot be solved easily; this follows from the undecidability of math.

It could well be that harnessing the energy of one star is sufficient for most of that. This is very hard to detect for an observer.

Going K3 to 100 billion stars of the galaxy "only" gives you a 10^11 constant factor speedup at enormous expense and with Amdahl's penalty at galactic scales.

Astrophysicists tell us that star formation will continue for 100 trillion years.

We are indeed among the first simply because of the sheer amount of time left ahead of us vs. behind us. It's basic math. We are at 0.014% of the expected duration of this universe.

We are a late by random 100000000 years since the point of as early as we could, which is a pretty big error.

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