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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

On a galactic scale, I wonder what the average time is between a species evolving intelligence, mastering technology, then using that technology to wipe themselves out of existence?

That's the most likely answer to the question, 'where are all the aliens?'

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I'm not convinced it's a Fermi paradox solution. I'm not saying civilizations don't sometimes destroy themselves but

a). the one civilization we know of didn't do it yet and

b). doesn't this require something inherent to life for this to explain the fermi paradox? it seems like this just moves the question from "where are all the aliens" to "why does every civilization regardless of environment/planet/etc. ALWAYS destroy themselves" which doesn't seem like an easier question to answer?

we've seen many, many cases of civilizations not making it. In the case of the Mayan Empire, it is looking like they killed off their civilization via climate change -- weather models show that the increased agriculture and removal of the surrounding jungle would have dropped annual rainfall, leading to the drop in water levels that we know happened in the cinotes (where they got all their water), leading to the collapse of the civilization (lost knowledge and culture). By the time Cortez arrived, nobody knew how to build nor maintain their megalithic structures.

Now, total extinction of a civilization meaning all of a civilized species, maybe we saw that with neanderthals and other early hominids.

Yes, and if we do end this civilization it will be much harder to bootstrap the next one. The easily accessible coal and oil are gone.

True, I guess what I meant is that we didn't blow ourselves up during the Cold War. For something to be a Fermi Paradox solution it has to explain the _complete_ lack of life we see. Something being hard or requiring luck isn't enough due to the vastness of space. It would still occur countless times even if rare

> I guess what I meant is that we didn't blow ourselves up during the Cold War

By being just lucky in many times. I imagine a scenario where one mistake happened and people took the wrong decision in one moment. It is not like if you repeated the cold war 1000 times you will end up fine in most of them. Lets remember that submarine in Cuban crisis, if this Soviet officer did not give his authentication we wouldn't get into that point. If you repeat the scenario with 1000 officers from this era, I wouldn't like our chances.

But the fermi paradox isn't about explaining why one specific civilization isn't present. It's about the _complete_ lack of alien life we observe. In the vast cosmos, there isn't any civilizations that have "got lucky" I don't see how this explanation addresses the core point

A suffers from survivorship bias, right? The civilization in which we exist can’t have destroyed itself yet if we are to have made that observation.

Sure, but compared to what? I don't know what you would call the bias of "imaginging bad stuff happening in the future, and for some reason the bad stuff is inevitable regardless of planet, lifeform, etc."

It is one of the leading Late filters; that excellence in the species cannot compensate for the inefficiencies in extracting energy to continue existing; leading to environmental/social problems, inevitably leading to either environmental collapse, preventing space colonialism, or social collapse.

Nuclear energy is a popular crux, but not needed per se.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCzpYxedIe0

I am totally unconvinced by this whole "technology is a great filter" argument. First of all I have my doubts that, even at the height of the cold war, nuclear war would've extinctic all of humanity and nowadays with much less ordinance definitely not.

Equally climate change is very unlikely to extinct all humans and dont even get me started on all the other "extinction risks" such as rogue AI or bioweapon because they are merely sci-fi and again would almost certainly not get everyone.

We definitely dont have a convincing solution to the fermi paradox and if we did it would certainly not be so trite and silly of an idea as "technology kills"

It doesn't have to kill everyone, just destroy the technological society and that would solve Fermi's paradox. Think about the things our technological society consumes, particularly petroleum. There's no way there is enough of it to last a thousand years (a blip on a cosmological time scale). We have no way of feeding our current population without fossil fuels for fertilizer. Maybe that ends in a technological transition to something else, or a social transition to something sustainable. Maybe. There aren't a lot of data points.

I was hoping someone would bring up the technological aspect of a collapse of modern society and then regrowth. There are two major issues with humans post-collapse being able to create a technological society and these are lack of fossil fuels and surface deposits of metals being used up. Both of these work together to make an industrial evolution type event very difficult and perhaps impossible.

I would wager that there is a different type of technological path requiring less fossil fuels and less surface metals. I dont have any data to support this belief obviously but I do believe that given enough time a human society could develop technology to enable space colonization without the jumpstart of an industrial revolution. This would look like slow generational iteration as opposed to explosive revolution and therefore would be more sustainable IMO.

Surely any post-collapse society could just mine the cities for metals. And presumably with a much reduced population there would be plenty of arable land for growing oil bearing crops obviating the need for most fossil fuels.

It's disputed whether even modern ethanol production is energy-positive. But trying to start an entire biofuels production chain from scratch would certainly not be net positive, as you would need to already have mechanized agriculture and a petrochemical industry to get that efficiency.

Coal liquefaction would probably be superior to biofuels, as it seems we will give up using it before it is depleted.

Metals wouldn’t be a problem. The metals we already mined will be all over the place in the form of abandoned junk from before the collapse

Iron is arguably the most important, and also degrades - past, as I understand it, the point at which it can be recovered by low-tech processes. The longer it takes to bootstrap a second industrial revolution the harder it would become.

Yeah this is the issue with metals and likely the largest barrier to a post collapse society. Likely ironworking would end up looking like pre-industrial japan where iron was very extremely valuable and of relatively low quality compared to the west due to the problems with smelting it from iron sands.

This is why I propose long term technological advancement without a second industrial revolution.

Green fertiliser can be produced at ~3x the cost of petroleum-based fertilizers.

Nobody does it because it's uneconomical as long as oil is cheap.

Climate change will ruin food production, not global fertilizer shortages.

I agree that civilizations (including humans) are unlikely to completely wipe themselves out, but it is not at all certain that we could recover to our present technology after a cataclysmic event.

Once we mine out all easily accessible fossil fuels, we'll cross a certain point of no return. After that point, a 19th century type industrial revolution will no longer be (easily) possible. Let's say a truly cataclysmic war happens and we just lose access to modern technology. Would we be able to regain it at some point? Could we rebuild a modern civilization without having access to the most energy dense and convenient fuel known to us even today?

Sure, we wouldn't go extinct, but if we are no longer able to travel beyond our own planet, we may as well have filtered ourselves out from the galactic stage.

As I have said elsewhere in this thread, I do believe there is a technological path requiring less fossil fuels and less easily accessible surface metals that would allow humans to achieve high technology and do the whole space colonization thing without an industrial revolution. It would take an order of magnitude or two longer and would be iterative and generational as opposed to explosive and revolutionary and might be more sustainable for it. Obviously I have no data to support this but its my intuition that its possible and perhaps even common for other life in the galaxy

A full scale nuclear war and the resulting fallout would be unimagineably devastating. Whether that kills 100% of humans or only 99.99% doesn't really matter. The natural world we rely on would be obliterated along with us. There would be no remaining governments or modern technology. Rebuilding an advanced society in a post apocalyptic wasteland would take an incredibly long time, if it's even possible.

Even then, the question would be "Should we?". If our current society ends by violently destroying virtually all life on the planet it will have been the biggest failure of a culture in history by a huge margin. Any survivors might very well develop some incredibly strong prohibitions against unchecked technological change.

Yes nuclear war is very scary. Yes it would be catastrophic to the ecosphere and human society. It is also incredibly unlikely that it would result in the extinction of humans. Also the idea that a post-collapse society would have some taboo against technology is possible but even if true would not hold for long or be particularly widespread. Any group who abandoned that taboo would quickly become more powerful than those who didnt.

Heres some good reading on post collapse society and extinction talked about more in depth. Long story short theres been lots of exaggeration and fear mongering about nuclear war. Clearly its apocalyptic and we dont need to exaggerate anything about it to make it scary. Its already scary. It would be better to have realistic conversations about this.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221016195507/https://forum.eff...

While I also think that this is unrelated to the Fermi paradox, the global threat and real impact of a nuclear exchange wouldn't be direct impact, but the ecological crisis of a nuclear winter.

I would imagine it's a pretty short timespan, relatively speaking. Technology can progress exponentially in a way that biology does not. Once a society gets to the point where they can create existential risks faster than they can manage them, in an accelerating fashion, things are likely to collapse in pretty short order.

Our own society has created a number of serious risks for ourselves that our evolved minds aren't great at mitigating in just the last century. Now think about how tech is accelerating and what might be developed in the next 1000 years. We're either going to figure out a new structure for managing existential risks or die trying.

As usual with the filters, the problem always is that the filter has to be so significant that it's essentially guaranteed to happen. Else the galaxy should still be full of aliens. We seem to keep scraping by with close calls, so it doesn't seem all that guaranteed that a technological civilization wipes itself out before it can establish itself among the stars.

We've had several close calls in the last ~80 years. I have no idea what the actual probabilities of inciting WWII and causing a nuclear winter were in the Korean war, Cuban Missile Crisis, Able Archer exercise, and various computer errors and false alarms that occurred, but if you're rolling the dice on existing every 10 years, the chances of taking over the galaxy in a million years are remote.

I think you meant WWIII, but it does bring up another interesting possibility—WWII could be seen as the release of pressure which had been building, in some sense inevitable. If we were only slightly less belligerent as a species, we might have been able to put it off until nukes were invented, and what a mess that would have been. If we were only slightly more belligerent, we could have blown ourselves up in the Cold War. Of course, belligerence isn’t a tunable parameter that you can tweak without changing all of history, but it is funny to think that we just happened to land right in the sweet spot.

But none of our technology can really let us spread at this stage. We’re barely detectable from nearby solar systems.

It’s very possible that the technology required to travel between solar systems is where the filter occurs and we’re in a narrow window of having enough technology to look around at nearby planets before we wipe ourselves out.

Give it time. Let’s check back on this once our ability to nuke ourselves is as old as the Great Pyramid of Giza was in Cleopatra’s time.

For all we know the galaxy is full of aliens who just never find each other. Space is big and light is only so fast.

Billions of forms of life on this earth over billions of years and we are the only ones to make cities and send junk into space. I’m not sure why we have this fallacy expect other alien life to look anything like humanity.

On the other hand, there were billions of forms of life on this earth, and the first and only one to develop advanced technology took over the entire planet in the blink of an eye.

Why would we not expect the apex species on other planets to likewise dominate their ecosystems?

Bacteria took over the planet. We are merely a host. We aren’t even long term habitants of all the continents much less the ocean. Meanwhile bacteria have colonized even the air currents on earth.

Technology is evil and evil kills everyone OMG cut to credits of B-movie sci-fi flick.

No. That's trite and silly. There's a much, much more likely answer to the Fermi Paradox -- so likely it's obvious. So obvious it's boring. So boring that everyone ignores it. I don't understand why. It's so blaringly obvious that the answer to the Fermi Paradox is:

Intelligent life is unbelievably, inconceivably, staggeringly unlikely. Quadrillions of universes lived and died without any life emerging -- at least any that could create a civilization. It has literally never, ever happened before, because the odds of it happening are one in 10^billions. It's nearly completely impossible. Which is why uncountable eternities with uncountable cycles of uncountable universes have passed with no life ever emerging ... except, except just this once.

Just this once, it happened. And what are the odds that, given life occurred on one planet, that it would be on that planet that its lifeforms looked around and asked "what are the odds of life? Shouldn't life be everywhere? It's everywhere on this planet!" What are the odds that it would be us lifeforms that life happened to? Well, 100%. So it looks easy. But it's not.

See? Boring. Life is staggeringly close to impossible. It will take another 10^10000000 universes being born and dying before it ever happens again. There is absolutely nowhere else in our entire universe, as big as it is, where intelligent life happened.

But you'll continue to ignore that answer, because deep scary biblical lessons about how the AI plague is consuming the universe and the Mass Effect reapers are going to come one day because we're making noise in the Dark Forest ... well, those just make better Sci-Fi books.

And yet if you shuffle a deck of cards, that particular order of cards will never again be seen in the universe, or hundreds of other universes full of card-shufflers. It is staggeringly close to impossible that you could have possibly gotten that order of cards. Are you really so sure that life didn't require more particulars to be exactly right than one specific order of a 52-card deck? It's so blindingly obvious that everyone just refuses to see it.

> everyone just refuses to see it.

You are not the only person to ever think that life might be super rare in the universe. This is not a unique or even a rare opinion. People can speculate on other reasons for its rarity while still knowing it's likely to just be a naturally rare event. And there's no way you (you personally, and I guess humanity as a whole) can know it's as rare as 1 in 10^1000000 universes either, so your hypothesis is as evidence free as other hypotheses.

Meh, the boring answer is that it's probably common, but interstellar detection and signalling is very hard, and interstellar travel is impossible with the materials available in a single star system.

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