Comment by robbiep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robbiep | Hacker News Reader

This whole thing (futurism, the (+-Not)singularity, what may one day come) is fascinating to me and clearly pretty much everyone.

Getting aside from the pseudo-religious arguments which are often raised in objection (and, personally I believe legitimately), I think we are left with 2 options:

1) the Singularity is a real thing which will happen at some point in the future

2) Consciousness is not able to be crafted by man and the logistics of downloadable consciousnesses and infinately extendable lifespans are forever beyond us, and life will continue pretty much as it has since pre-history, with better technology making a 'richer' life a possibility for a greater and greater proportion of humanity.

As much as I would hope for option 1) the question I feel needs to be asked is why have not other conscious beings (which logically must exist elsewhere in the universe regardless of the numbers you plug into the Drake equation) come to us in their flying robot suits?

The complex interplay of neurology and computing is only in it's infancy, and I wait with bated breath at the advances we are making in our understanding..

Concerning your question, you're probably familiar with these arguments, but here goes.

Assuming it's true, the main conclusion from Fermi's paradox (which is really an observation more than a Paradox) is that there is some kind of "cliff" that vastly reduces the number of civilisations that achieve the technology required to come visit us with their robot suits.

The interesting question is, where is this cliff: before where we are now, or after?

If it is before, then that's great for us. What it means is, for example, that perhaps the evolution of life, or multi-cellular life, or animal life, or intelligent life, etc - is so unlikely that even though there are trillions of trillions of attempts, those that succeed are so far apart that they will never meet (perhaps thanks to the expansion of the universe, or through the difficulty of travelling across interstellar distances, etc). That's the lucky scenario.

The unlucky scenario is that this cliff is after where we are now. Perhaps there are millions of intelligent species even in just the Milky Way, but perhaps intelligent life is doomed to self-destroy eventually (for example by reaching a Singularity, building a Dyson sphere, and then basically disappearing up its own arse; or perhaps by ending in some kind of nuclear war, or biological wipeout after someone's biology experiment goes horribly wrong, etc).

That latter scenario would mean that we're likely to kill ourselves before we get to the stars.

I hope for the first scenario.

Edit: Of course, as pixl97 points out, perhaps Fermi's paradox is an incorrect observation, and the aliens are already here, they're just being really cautious about being observed.

Is there any reason to think, that if there were many alien civilizations in our galaxy capable capable of radio transmission, that we would be have picked up on the signal? The last I checked (and I admit it has been a few years), the folks at SETI have basically said that even if the Milky Way galaxy was rife with technologically advanced civilizations the chance that we would have observed one is very small, given current efforts to date.

I've read a paper which pretty much lays out exactly the argument you describe, and the whole time I couldn't help but think the author was ignoring the very obvious. We can't even be sure that advanced civilizations would use radio that much, if at all, and even if they did, it's not as though we've conducted such a thorough search that we can confidently say "nope, no radios here". Not even close, in fact.

"perhaps the evolution of life, or multi-cellular life, or animal life, or intelligent life, etc - is so unlikely ..."

Bacterial life appeared on Earth pretty much as soon as the planet had cooled down.

An argument could be that some extremely unlikely chemical coincidence was needed to create life, but I think the observation gives more support for the theory that if you have a planet with prebiotic soup, the biotic part is going to kick in pretty soon.

But then it took 4 billion years -- or 30% of the whole universe's lifetime -- for life to invent multicellularity (with some important steps, like the invention of nucleus and thus eukaryotic cells, still unicellular life, half-way in between).

I don't have a problem believing that bacterial life is abundant in the universe. But life on Earth, inventing multicellularity only in 4 billion years, and then sentience only in 0.6 billion more (multicellularity obviously being the harder part), is among the fast ones.

Wait another 4 billion years to give the slower ones a fair chance to discover multicellularity, too.

why have not other conscious beings

1. We are the first, or we are the first to get close to the singularity in our light cone.

or

2. Generating energies or over coming the challenges of even traveling close to the speed of light is hard.

or

3. Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.

or

4. They have.

1. I hope.

2. It doesn't matter; the galaxy can be completely converted to computronium in around 10M years even at 1% of the speed of light.

3. Exponential growth is bigger than space.

4. ...or in a simulation.

>>>3. Exponential growth is bigger than space

Some people think that space is expanding as well. These people think that intra-galactic distances are relatively consistent, but inter-galactic distances are increasing in an accelerating fashion.

"Additionally, the expansion rate of the universe has been measured to be accelerating due to the repulsive force of dark energy which appears in the theoretical models as a cosmological constant. This acceleration of the universe, or "cosmic jerk", has only recently become measurable, and billions of years ago, the universe's expansion rate was actually decelerating due to the gravitational attraction of the matter content of the universe. According to the simplest extrapolation of the currently-favored cosmological model (known as "ΛCDM"), however, the dark energy acceleration will dominate on into the future."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space

Point taken. As an explanation for the Fermi Paradox, however, that isn't so useful. :)

5. Would it be "ethycal" for a "post-singularity" civilization to contact a "pre-singularity" one?

Think a bit about this one. Let's define singularity as the ability to either a. upgrade our brains without any biological limits or b. upload our consciousness to a computer that can be upgraded without limits, as immortality and all other consequences will follow from this. Interfering with a pre-singularity race would be the equivalent of us using a newly discovered limitless brain enhancing technology to bring monkeys, dolphins and even cockroaches, as from our infinitely high level downwards a monkey would seen close in intelligence to a cockroach, to human and then limitless superhuman levels! Think about this for a moment! Would you want to waste your technology to "upgrade" inferior life (and possibly trespassing their "free will to choose their own evolutionary strategy"), when you could create new intelligence from scratch that would be designed to evolve faster and be more like you so you could feel empathy for it?

I don't think a post-singularity civilization would bother contacting a pre-singularity one. They would either analyze it stealthly without interfering ...or just use them or their homeworld for resources without caring about their fate or even their survival!

Now, assuming there really is a discernible point of "singularity" by the a. and b. mentioned above, the meeting of two post-singularity civilizations would be a whole different thing. I think we have quite a bit to "grow up" until we get invited into any "galactic club" :)

This is a question that was bothering me as well. It seems like evolution will always eventually lead to a singularity, so why don't we see it all around us?

Jason Silva has an explanation that I think could be on the right track: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQOyJUDTKdM&noredirect=1

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