Hacker News Reader

Comment by openrisk | Hacker News Reader

> the hypothesis postulates that previously a species different from ours had achieved high intelligence and technological civilization on this planet

An interesting special version of this hypothesis is that if a species has achieved truly high intelligence and advanced technology, it may by design not have left any traces. Not because of modesty but because long-term sustainable existence actually required being light on environmental impact.

Changing your environment at planetary scale and breakneck speed is not necessarily the pinnacle of intelligence, certainly not if you have manifestly not yet understood all its intricacies, interdependence etc. A lack of understanding coupled with aggressive random interventions may even affect the very survival of a species.

The downside of the deep-sea tree-huger cephalopod scenario is that it is even harder to falsify...

View on HN

> Changing your environment at planetary scale and breakneck speed is not necessarily the pinnacle of intelligence, certainly not if you have manifestly not yet understood all its intricacies, interdependence etc. A lack of understanding coupled with aggressive random interventions may even affect the very survival of a species.

Well apparently their strategy to ensure survival didn't do too well since we're discussing an extinct civilization here.

South Park subtitle:

"This is what de-growthers actually believe."

That's the exact opposite of what de-growthers believe (though my experience has been that most 'de-growthers' are in fact imaginary straw men since I've only met people decrying them, none truly espousing these beliefs as a strategy).

The beliefs described by the parent are basically the de facto beliefs of everyone who believes the climate crisis can be solved through some form of accelerationism.

I don't think there's even a question that the only proven method of reducing emissions and slowing climate change is to leave fossil fuels in the ground (which is by definition de-growth in practice). But there has never been any remotely serious will for actions of this nature.

What you actually have to "prove" is that you can pass/execute the laws required to "leave the fossil fuels in the ground".

All evidence thus far is that it's not happening, no one even votes for that under democracies.

So far, all evidence is that we can pass laws, create engineering, and cause behavior change that leads to reducing carbon emissions without hurting growth.

If you care about reducing carbon, the strategy of "destroy capitalism first" isn't going to happen at all, and especially not soon enough to have the impact you want.

Parent comment does not say that their preffered, nonetheless the only way to "leave the fossil fuels in the ground" is to pass laws mandating that, nor that they favor a "destroy capitalism first" approach. Leaving fossil fuels in the ground by say encouraging the adoption of another energy source like solar has thus far been a successful strategy.

The people publishing books using the term "degrowth" (Jason Hickel, etc.) do call for destroying capitalism and believe fighting for climate change isn't compatible with growth.

Green growth people (like myself) argue that we can grow without incurring the negative carbon impacts given proper policy / tech.

We very much want solar, etc. technologies that do this. Degrowth isn't the solution.

A strategy for avoiding one particular death is not a strategy to ensure survival.

There are >1 ways for a civilization to become extinct.

> Well apparently their strategy to ensure survival didn't do too well since we're discussing an extinct civilization here.

Maybe they're "extinct here", because they just left.

BTW. this is actually a big theme in David Brin's Uplift saga[0]. Basically, you have all these alien civilizations, more and less friendly to each other, but bound by some common rules, some of which regulate sustainable colonization. This includes an exclusive right to settle and use a habitable planet with a biosphere for $whatever number of millenia, and after that time, the civilization there is supposed to pack up and leave, fix environmental damage, and erase any trace of their existence, commonly achieved by dumping everything into the planet's subduction zones so it gets naturally recycled; after that, the planet is to lie fallow for ${some other number} of millenia, to give nature a chance at creating more biodiversity and stuff.

Quite ingenious setting, if you ask me.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplift_Universe

The problem I see with this scenario is: if you're a biological being, planets with a compatible biosphere are probably extremely rare. Just having a biosphere might not be sufficient, if the makeup of the atmosphere is poisonous to you or it's too hot or cold for the way your species evolved. So why would alien civilizations agree to such a thing instead of just adopting a planet and staying there? The whole premise seems to agree that the aliens are all biologically compatible with each other, despite evolving on different worlds. Perhaps they bio-engineer themselves each time they settle on a new world?

In that galactic society, a races' power and prestige are measured by what client races that have "uplifted", taking species that naturally evolved on those fellow planets and then engineering then with intelligence and directing their society. (To some extent in the other direction too: A race might have powerful patrons or grandpatrons that are still around.)

Anyway, point is that for the kinds of races likely to get their manipulators on a fresh planet, direct colonization is often way down their list of priorities. (And perhaps most of their population is already in a Dyson swarm or something.)

Also, the deep history of visits means there's been time for a lot of similar biology to spread around.

it's a bit more involved than that, IIRC (been a while) - the civilisations involved typically migrate around the galaxy, entierly abandoning entire arms of the milky way and moving to another; agreements with other non-compatible civilisations mean that those that remain exist in an extremely hostile environment (the wars between the oxygen and hydrogen breathers, in particular, were notable until they managed to come to this arrangement).

There are also significant numbers of extremely agressive and militaristic civilisations, mostly held back by the laws and customs of setting, who would gleefully seek out and destroy anyone not following along.

We’re talking millions of years. Maybe they’re post-biological.

> So why would alien civilizations agree to such a thing instead of just adopting a planet and staying there?

I'm guessing you've not read them?

The gimmick of the series is that all sentient species were uplifted from non-sentient animals, and they were uplifted by species that were uplifted, which in turn were uplifted... and none of them knows by whom or by what. The "progenitors", the hypothesized first sentients that uplifted a presumed first generation, are lost to prehistory and nobody knows.

So there is a shared culture and a small degree of shared biology, because each generation of uplifters uses existing models of sentient species to model new sentient species. There are only so many ways to invent the wheel, although Brin was very imaginative indeed in this.

Humans were not uplifted; we're called "wolflings" and as a terrifying novel abomination would have been exterminated upon discovery, were it not for the novels' future setting having us already started work uplifting dolphins, chimpanzees, orang utans and a handful of other species. If humans were not a progenitor species the aliens would have extirpated us -- but we have client species of our own.

He does have answers to most of the objections one might come up with.

Brin's ideas were influenced by Larry Niven, and riffed upon by Terry Pratchett in his early SF works. Later Brin novels riff on ideas from his own earlier ones.

In their time, in the 1980s, I really enjoyed them. I own them all, several in hardback. I haven't re-read them in decades so I don't know how they hold up, but Brin is alive and still active.

>Well apparently their strategy to ensure survival didn't do too well since we're discussing an extinct civilization here.

Not necessarily. They could have existed hundreds of millions of years ago, and become victims of the Chixhulub asteroid impact or other huge natural disaster after successfully maintaining an advanced civilization for hundreds of thousands of years, FAR longer than our probably ill-fated civilization has managed. They might have also left the planet. Or they could have transcended into energy beings.

External factors are the obvious answer, the Earth and its planetary environment are actively evolving over geological scales.

Another intriguing possibility is some sort of senility setting in after long-term evolutionary success. The intelligent cephalopods eventually got tired seeking answers from a mysterious Universe and settled for the quite life.

"their strategy to ensure survival didn't do too well "

We aren't doing that well either. Too early to tell. But I think we've shown enough problems to at least speculate on how we will do during the coming 'great filters'.

Of course, we do have tree hugging octopus today: Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus! https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/ (j/k)

A theory about a previous advanced civilization must first and foremost explain how and why it skipped using all the obvious under-your-feet materials and fuel sources in its initial phase.

I'm not a fan of the Silurian hypothesis, but maybe it could have predated Theia?

More tantalizing, maybe there's a universe-level Silurian analog where our Big Bang was predated by another universe teeming with intelligent life.

Maybe we get Silurian'd ourselves.

Theia hit Earth within 100-150 million years of the formation of Earth. It seems exceedingly implausible that life could not only emerge but go through all the stages of development necessary to achieve advanced intelligence in such a short time compared to what it took the "second" time around.

And in that period it wasn’t particularly habitable either. An observer may not find that big of a difference between a recently formed planet and a planet recently hit by another planet.

Twist: Oil and coal are the post-breakdown byproducts of the stuff they wanted to clean. :p

Well, the carbon our civilization has been burning started forming about 350-300 million years ago (from Carboniferous period, it's in the name), and the Silurian period was 420-440 million years ago, so what Silurians would have had under their tentacles isn't what we bootstrapped our society with.

Maybe they used plenty of the under-your-tentacles fuel sources, but it's been a very long time since, and it's hard to tell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_time_scale

One answer is that this "initial phase" may have lasted a total of a few hundred years, which is a tiny blip on geological scales. Even with humans, it looks like it's going that way.

And taking it even further, maybe they still exist, but have advanced so far they are undetectable to our simple minds and senses, similar to how an ant or bacteria has no idea about our existence. Maybe there are millions of advanced species that we can't detect, considering that there are millions of species we are aware of, and statistically it's unlikely that we would be the most advanced.

That's actually a factor that diseases aim for. Mortal diseases don't spread as much as the ones that don't damage the host as much. Because of this, severe diseases sometimes evolve into mild ones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com