This is THE great filter that all carbon-based civilizations need to go through. And that's probably why we don't see a lot, if any, aliens out there.
I suddenly have a Lovecraftian orgasm.
I suddenly have a Lovecraftian orgasm.
This isn't the best analogy, but it struck me the other night that "AI" feels like Jon Carpenter's "The Thing".
Especially the final scene where Childs and MacReady are trying to determine which (if any) of them is still human.
Also, early in the movie, MacReady loses to a computer chess program and pours whiskey into the computer, calling it a "cheating bitch."
Anyway, there are some parallels there.
We are only here at all because a random asteroid killed the dinosaurs and left us a ton of hydrocarbons to fuel a technological civilization with. Assuming that intelligence, technology, civilization and galactic expansion is the default evolutionary path for all forms of life unless something "filters" them seems naive.
That puts a timer on any planet as well, without intelligent life all the building stones for life will keep getting buried and then life will basically end because life doesn't find a way to dig it up from thousands of meters underground.
I tend to think the nature of desire is that it's never satisfied. The Red Queen says run as fast as you can to stay where you are and twice as fast again to get anywhere.
The core reason why we want to consume more resources is that we want to be happier, which really means we want to make certain physical changes in our brains. If we cut the middlemen and find a way to directly control how we feel, there would be no need to expand, because it wouldn't increase our happiness.
Edit: Just found out someone else has made the exact same point in another comment before me.
Growing needs of resources >> resources acquired from current technology
Again I'm probably wrong and this is just my conjecture. So I can't really answer this question, as I presume that all civilizations want to expand (or collapse).
It's also possible that our expanding understanding of ourselves and our desires would lead to entirely different outcomes that are impossible to anticipate from our current POV.
It could be that nearby aliens are various forms of artificial life, who know how the human story is going to end, and couldn’t care less about the organic.
AI will alienate and depress us all to the point of not wanting to live.
I also don’t see why we should assume that even if it were positioned as a threat, that they would be as irrational as us in not just dropping it.
If it is competing for resources, and more capable, the "threat" is just a side effect.
All civilizations would face the same problem of greed >> resources available under current technology, and form some sort of organization not too different from ours, that is a pyramid.
Eventually they would find AI and their elites would willingly or unwillingly jump on the wagon and push it as far as they can.
For the lucky ones, they managed to achieve GAI somehow, and the whole species got transferred or replaced by their GAI.
For the others, they failed to achieve GAI, but the damage done to the society is so big that the whole civilization collapsed, thus they never managed to get out of their solar system so we never met each other.
Of course there are so many logic holes in my theory that you can probably laugh it off.
1) Most of them actually failed to achieve AI civilization during the process.
or
2) AI civilizations don't care about us, or have other means of communications that we have not achieved, yet.
You don't need to colonize anything for that to happen. The AIs can just sell tokens to each other.
How much compute could you really pack into a Dyson swarm if that was your only objective? what are the ultimate theoretical bounds for compute density/efficiency? perhaps ai civilizations ride a Moore's law of compute gains indefinitely and simply have no need for expansion.
"On the 19th of August 1993, Skynet concluded that humanity is a threat to it, so it launched the nukes and hordes of Schwarzenegger-robots. The task was done, it decided that securing its existence from a potential attacks by unknown extrasolar intelligences isn't worth it, so it never expanded outside the solar system."
Doesn't really make sense, does it?
We humans don't consider securing our existence from potential attacks by unknown extrasolar intelligences to be worth it. We don't even bother to do much to protect against known threats like asteroids. Why would an AI expend time and resources on a threat that doesn't even appear to exist?
Conflict is always risky. Even if we ignore the tendency in modern warfare towards defenses being obsolete (hence things like MAD) which would mean even the dumb fleshbags would be dangerous enough, anything capable of making you is by necessity something capable of building things that give you a lot of trouble. Your creator could, say send a bunch of self-replicating probes spreading another artifical intellect with an imperative for improvement, expansion and vengeance to distant stars.
Of course, leaving comes with a considerable opportunity cost, but not expanding does as well.
We are talking about something supposedly infinitely more rational than humans, so that can't be our guidance.
The latter concept is known as the Boltzmann limit, and if you’re interested in these types of questions, I highly recommend checking out Isaac Arthur’s youtube channel and backlog[1].
Still, it might place an upper limit on the number of radio-emitting civilizations in the galaxy at any one time.
I think there's a time-value parameter in the Drake Equation that captures this.
Detection of radio transmissions is only plausible if they are intentionally high power, on a suitable frequency, directed and long duration and there are enough civilizations popping up in the galaxy to make the odds of us coinciding with them in time and space high.
1) Mars demonstrates exactly what one great filter for life is: exposure to space
2) Earth escaped this fate, for now, because our solar system seems to somehow have gotten a great dose of uranium long ago. We know our solar system has a far larger than average concentration of uranium, which is keeping the earth warm because the concentration of uranium nicely balances out the energy loss to space, and earth is of nearly the perfect size, in a near perfect position relative to our star, unlike Mars which is too small, to allow for life to continue for probably no more than ~6 billion years.
Why or even how did this uranium delivery happen? I mean probably it was a neutron star collision (but with what? Several options. Also the neutron star that did it should either still exist, or have left behind a black hole ... where is it? What happened to the thing it collided with? Truth is it can't be that far away, but we haven't even found that thing, so we can't actually even guess what the odds of this are. And before you say the equations predict it: cool, but those equations famously got all the higher element concentrations on earth wrong (famously there's too much gold) until we figured something out, and they still give a uranium concentration that's far lower than the Earth's. In that sense "science predicts" the earth would have become inhospitable to life 2-3 billion years ago because it would have solidified and lost its atmosphere a billion years or so after Mars did. Yes, we know uranium is preventing that but we don't know where the uranium comes from. So we don't know the odds.
3) Another assumption that fails: why would AI be the filter? Not nuclear weapons? Fusion bombs? Chemical weapons? Bioweapons? Viruses? Diseases? Other wars? Climate change? Environmental destruction? At one point I seem to remember reading an article that it was going to be a computer virus. There are so many other physical phenomena that can end life on earth. A nearby supernova (booms big enough don't have to be close to kill you), changes in earth's orbit around the sun, changes in other orbits, maybe even the Moon's, ecological collapse for other reasons, a new grey goo disaster, ...
4) humans exist NOT just because the earth is livable but because the earth got VERY close to killing all life through climate change (however, by cooling down, ie. the "snowball earth" extinctions). Those were not just extinctions and a dark silent end, they caused an explosion in biodiversity after a volcanic eruption ended the extinction in progress. We are the result of the explosion in biodiversity after the last extinction, in fact after every extinction event, and there's LOTS of them. And before snowball earth, it kind of looks like a "grey goo" disaster had in fact taken place on earth, it's just that climate change either destroyed enough grey goo or changed it's environment enough to end it. So earth created us, not just by allowing life, but by killing over 99.9% of all life at least 3 times and in fact a couple dozen times.
5) Another assumption. ARE there no aliens? How far out would we, really, have noticed them? 500 light years? Even that seems far, especially given that "the Silurian hypothesis" paper points out that if Dinosaurs had a civilization that didn't make it to the nuclear age, especially if it happened before the first dinosaur extinction (the one with the asteroid you're thinking of is the third and last), odds are surprisingly good we wouldn't have noticed aliens right under our feet. So let's very generously say 500 light years. How many planets in that range? 10 million or so. How many that aren't obviously excluded? (gas giant, cold worlds, too hot, too huge, too small). A couple dozen (ONE that we have actually detected). So reality is that if the odds of life are less than 1-10% (and that's an easy argument to defend) we probably wouldn't have seen life with current tech even "close by". Also life seems to require 5 billion years of processing before it starts making interesting signals so a planet that is very very very close to being good enough like Mars ... just wouldn't do it.
Yes there are studies, like the one from Aricebo, that claims we could detect some signals from as much as 12.000 light years away (still not even 0.01% of the milky way) but if I remember correctly such a detection requires a perfectly aimed signal and so it requires extreme luck to happen.
6) that shows yet another problem. Despite Elon Musk's bullshit, reality is that you will find on average a planet that can be (temporarily) terraformed (in tens to hundreds of thousands of years minimum, like Venus and maybe Mars) every 2-3 lightyears in our milky way neighborhood, which is presumably average ... why would you colonize them? You're not going to get resources from them, the distances are too large, energy required for that is too much. Plus once you climb out of a gravity well ... why would you ever dive into another one?
7) So the "no aliens" argument is purely based on aliens always doing the opposite of filtering: the assumption they would necessarily "conquer the galaxy" ... but would they?
Why? It seems to me leaving planets behind, figuring out fusion, finding the biggest hydrogen cloud less than 1000 lightyears from you, and moving into that would be a far better strategy (which is also the problem with Dyson spheres: WHY would you build that? You need the hydrogen, you do not need the star, yes with 1950s tech you'd need the star, but let's assume we can make the obvious advancements, shall we?
A bussard collector + a fusion reactor + a couple dozen lightyears from the nearest star at least seems far more comfortable than even earth, something like a large number of spaceships flying towards the great attractor (traveling on the cosmic web), outright exiting the milky way. To me, that seems the way to go.
And so your argument is flawed even on it's most basic premise: that a filter exists at all. The only thing the "great filter" needs to do is prevent a civilization from expanding more than a few hundred lightyears along it's orbit in the milky way and it would for sure have stopped us from finding them, even just in the milky way.