Epitaph – Fermi Paradox Simulator
mkremins.github.io
mkremins.github.io
Also, pretty funny to see civilizations that figure out rockets before e.g. steam engines and electricity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
Most likely the reason it remained a toy, rather than being put to productive use, was the abundance of slave labor.
This is something that get said a lot, but it misses technological and socio-ebergetic factors as well:
1. at that time metallurgy was very rudimentary, compared to how it was in the late 18th century. Most they wouldn't have been able to craft an efficient steam machine back then even if they tried very hard.
2. They also didn't use coal (I don't even know I'd they knew it), which makes fuel (wood) really expensive and also removes the self-reinforcing retroaction where you can use the steam machine to mine more coal and really contributed to the exponential nature of the industrial revolution.
The whole digging and drilling business, though - that's something else entirely.
A fun fact is that the reason we developed the metallurgy required to put high pressure gasses to work inside cylinders was in large part due to work on improving cannon manufacture.
Early cannons exploded a lot, but a cannon which occasionally explodes is a lot better at being a cannon than a steam engine that occasionally explodes is at being a steam engine. Having a "minimal viable product" for a cannon is much simpler than for a steam engine so they were able to iterate on the technology.
Should be some million years ago civilization starts, lives for thousands of years, goes extinct - but we never become aware of them. Most never send signals (radio or otherwise) strong enough for us to detect. Others did, but the signal hasn't reached us yet. Still others did, but the signals passed by before we developed the ability to detect them. Still others are reaching us now, but are so far below the noise floor we can't detect them.
The universe is large. You have to account for how slow the speed of light is when talking about the Fermi paradox.
The main thing the speed of light prevents is a single civilization staying together as a galaxy sized empire.
It seems to me that, in principle, a ruling class could set itself apart from humanity and conduct the business of a galactic government -- ahem, a galactic enlightened dictatorship, with its own timing.
For example, Alice and Bob live on Trantor, and are employees of the Galactic Federation. They constantly travel [at the same fractions of the speed of light] to clusters located in different galactic hemispheres, and, thanks to almost identical rates of time dilation in their [perhaps carefully chosen] travels, they meet every weekend of their proper time. They live happily as a family in the headquarters of the government, to the rhythm of the passing of countless generations on the myriad planets of the federation.
The second issue is it's not as attractive as it sounds. Travelling 1/10th the galaxy in a proper time of 5 days requires a trip of a constant 2400 G's. Maybe solvable once your civilization has already overcome the Fermi paradox (probably don't need bodies at that point) though.
Although, if you want to keep playing the game without constantly going through a bunch of already dead civs, then you'll need to hide them (Did this via Tampermonkey):
https://gist.github.com/SteveHere/1a19df5242802df3edcc7d34d5...
I remember being frustrated/saddened enough to dive into source code to find optimal strategy, and I found that even with this knowledge game kept my interest:
- each "year"(second) each death reason rolls its probability. If civ survives, there's also per year chance of developing tech on its own. It's optimal to advance tech asap
- technologies and a couple of lategame events change these probabilities - usually by removing small chance of early reason and adding new higher chance for later reason. It's mostly optimal to develop techs in clusters that cancel most of each other out and advance self-tech chance.
- tech tree roughly separates into 3 ages: early (up to and including sailing), middle (up to and excluding "modern times" with biology, transistors and newspapers) and late
early tech has (1)writing+math+astronomy techs that don't give additional death chance in any combo, but increase tech chance - research first (2)agri+fish+tools and fire+construction, metal+sailing that have higher death chance when you have all but 1 or 2 of them than if you have full cluster - focus if self-tech triggers (also agri and fish before tools) (3)architecture->plumbing decreases death chance - focus
middle tech doesn't change death chance, so you have a breather
late tech is most deadly - (1)taxonomy->germ->genetics tech branch has great death decrease on 2nd step, but last one gives high chance of bioweapon death (so don't. you'll fear self-tech doing it too); (2)exploding nukes event increases world war death chance, world peace event decreases it; (3)Ai is great danger but necessary - do it as late as possible (iirc there's like 1/3 chance of death on these last 1-2 steps)
When you learn all the numbers it becomes a great "tension - breather - tension" game, but still not with that high of a winrate. Nearby supernova death having a chance all the way through is kinda funny
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fun fact - I learned math behind Markov Chains just solve this game. Civs have like 1e-12 or 1e-15 chance of survival on their own, iirc (it was something very small, I don't remember now)
Only sad when you can seriously believe the various scenarios that play out...like teaching fishing could cause a civilization to cease to exist. It's a silly game that has no bearing on reality.
b) it's hard to judge what's possible or not without experimental data (on otherworldly civilizations), nor we're even explained the mechanisms of "us teaching others". But it's a schematic way of showing Great Filters in a simplified, gamified manner - and that's still a possible, valid and argued for answer to a Fermi Question
Exactly, the whole discussion is already extrapolation for sample of 1. Who knows how civilization would develop if we were more like bonobos less like chimpanzees.
Having limits to our understanding doesn't mean all things are equally possible.
For instance there aren't any 2 dimensional beings because it's impossible to slice a mathematical pure plane and have macroscopic objects exist in that plane even fields surrounding a singular atom exist in 3d.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epitaph
An epitaph (from Ancient Greek ἐπιτάφιος (epitáphios) 'a funeral oration'; from ἐπι- (epi-) 'at, over', and τάφος (táphos) 'tomb')[1][2] is a short text honoring a deceased person. Strictly speaking, it refers to text that is inscribed on a tombstone or plaque, but it may also be used in a figurative sense. Some epitaphs are specified by the person themselves before their death, while others are chosen by those responsible for the burial. An epitaph may be written in prose or in poem verse.
It's incredible to think about how many cataclysms humanity has lived through, yet also how many we have been lucky to avoid (so far...)
- display news top to bottom to quickly see what's to do next
- keep the live civilizations on the left and push the collapsed ones to the right / bottom
... permanent colonies on worlds other than Fratlat. Although still largely unable to travel outside of the Latbûut system, the distribution of Fratbac civilization across multiple worlds greatly reduces the risk that they will collapse due to any crisis of merely planetary scale.
In 3904, a swarm of self-replicating Fratbac nanobots began to replicate uncontrollably, devouring vast swaths of Fratlat at a rate which Fratbac scientists had formerly deemed impossible. After several days of rapid expansion, the swarm seems to have become dormant, but not before consuming approximately 5% of the entire mass of Fratlat and rendering Fratbac civilization completely extinct.
Also, where are the probabilities for mass-extinction-event-volcanic-eruptions are coming from? It looks like they are very likely to happen ... I have 8/10 so far...
If you get going really, really, really fast, a similar thing happens with the blue-shifted cosmic microwave background.
.... and at the same time endearing (?) to see all these fictional civilizations make similar mistakes ours did in the past...