On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers | Hacker News Reader

On the Great Filter, existential threats, and griefers

antipope.org

80 pointscstross43 comments

"I don't rule out the possibility of building robust self-sufficient off-world habitats. The problem I see is that it's vastly more expensive than building an off-world outpost and shipping rations there, as we do with Antarctica -- and our economic cost/benefit framework wouldn't show any obvious return on investment for self-sufficiency."

I think this is what eventually acts as the great filter.

In that by the time it is cost benefit approved to do something, the resources have already been depleted on something that would rake in more tokens in the short run.

and unless we manage to blow the atmosphere away, eventually nature moves in and covers everything up (what is uninhabitable for modern man don't seem the phase the rest of the animal kingdom much).

As such, the blue spheres we spot may be places that has come and gone already. But the only way to know for sure is to go there, and that is highly unlikely to ever happen.

Damn it, we keep finding new ruins in the Amazon constantly (never mind various deserts etc). It does not take long for nature to reclaim a region once civilization has gone bye bye.

All of these HN alternate explanations are listed and explained by Tim Urban here: http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

Here's my answer to the Fermi paradox: simulation. And not because we're in one (all respect to Nick Bostrom) but because when a civ reaches singularity, there's no point in expanding because the reality that it/they can live in from within a small efficient simulation machine is safer and cheaper than the prospect of interstellar expansion.

This has been my favourite explanation since I read Stross' book, Accelerando. The common argument I get against it is along the lines of "humans being too curious to abandon the real universe".

Of course simulation in this case doesn't answer the problem of Von Neuman probes and the like, as its still perfectly reasonable to expect a simulated race to have some physical presence and desire to explore the universe, however since we recognize the risks of these kinds of things so long before we even have the capability of launching our own VN probes, perhaps the vanishingly unlikely scenario is an advanced civilization actually doing it themselves?

>as its still perfectly reasonable to expect a simulated race to have some physical presence and desire to explore the universe

Greg Egan's Diaspora is a nice sf novel exploring this theme.

Yep, last time I made a comment about Accelerando, someone also pointed me to Diaspora. I finished it about 2 weeks ago, it was mind-blowing and I could not put it down. The reason I don't mention it though, is because its easier to relate our future to Accelerando than to the pure AI's in Diaspora.

I tend to think that the simulation hypothesis put forward in Stross's "A Colder War" is a much greater likelihood. :-/

It is not reasonable at all to expect any kind of interpretable psychological pattern from an alien life form.

Oh yes, I agree, and I wasn't trying to imply that this would always be the case. I just meant that just because a civilization is simulated doesn't mean they have necessarily cut all ties with the physical universe. A civilization CAN be 100% simulated, but still be sending probes out to other stars etc.

I don't necessarily disagree. I think that there's a likelihood that Von Neuman probes are a possible thing. But are they inevitable? Perhaps they are unlikely. What if the technology required to create reliable VNPs was only in the grasp of singularity civilizations due to the (perhaps) strong AI requirements?

There's this line, I think, where a civilization would look at the divergence that would happen over interstellar distances and realize that they weren't propagating themselves, but at worst, creating more rivals and existential threats for themselves.

It's easy enough for someone to make the right decision and turn all notions of intergalactic conquest into lived-out virtual reality fever dreams.

Yep, I would agree that it would be very unlikely that a civilization capable of launching them, WOULD launch them. We are nowhere close to being able to build these probes ourselves, but already understand the dangers of doing so. Even assuming that VN probes WERE launched by some civs, who is to say that they aren't stopped by other even more advanced civs before they can become a problem?

Overall, my feeling is that there are 2 things which cause the 'dead' universe we see.

1. The Great Filter is the evolution of intelligence. Since we are here, its easy for us to assume the evolution of sentience is normal, but the dinosaurs were around for almost 200m years and got nowhere. And if not for a string of lucky events, we wouldn't even be here, wondering these things right now.

2. Advanced civilizations prefer simulation and dont need to colonize the universe at all, I think this would be even more likely if the first point is true, since once you understand the physics of the universe, see that its a cold dead place and you are bound by its physical laws, simulation has a lot more to offer. I would love to invent my own universes, simulate them, and be able to watch and manipulate them with omnipotence.

Makes perfect sense to me. And re: simulation—absolutely. The rest of the universe would be, in comparison, pretty boring.

Also, I have to pick up Accelerondo. Sounds like a good one.

If there are 1000000 million advanced civs in our galaxy and 999999 of them decided not to expand, the 1 remaining will still colonize everything in a million years.

There is no reason for there to definitely be that ONE 'colonize everything' type civilization.

I would assume that it would be incredibly common for a species capable to interstellar travel to have 'cured' aging before starting to colonize the universe. There is no way we can know how a being with eternity before them thinks. Perhaps they will just do it very very slowly? Perhaps immortal civilizations have very slow population growth and decreased pressures to colonize? Perhaps there is a lot of red tape in the Interstellar Colonization Bureau to go through before you can colonize planets? Perhaps the ONE civilization decides it can only colonize barren planets, in which case they have to terraform before they can settle, slowing the process of colonization down exponentially?

I really love this topic, there is so much room for imagination.

Your assuming you can send colony probes at more than 10% of the speed of light. IMO more reasonable assumptions push colonizing the milky way out to 100+ million years.

Honestly it seems like people look at light speed the same way they look at markets and forget there are numbers below 1%. There are several ways to get a small probe up to fairly high speeds but slowing down is a lot more difficult.

Someone's gonna hack it. And when they do, they've found a weapon. Then we're back to civilization's arms races and existential threats in a new theatre.

i don't think I fully understand what you're saying, could you explain it in more detail?

So, if sterilizers are common, why don't we see them?

A Matrioshka Brain has a perfectly recognizable emission spectrum, we'd have recognized a few already if they were common. If they use plain style Von Neumann probes, why aren't they here, and why don't we see their reproduction remains?

Space is big ...

Not that big. Advanced technology, like replicators and a few million years are enough to reach galaxies far-far away.

Everything that is reliable for a couple of million of years will be heavy. If it is heavy - it will be slow. And we have that joyous dark energy lurking in the intergalactic space - traversing it may not be the easiest thing in the world.

I thought dark energy is something that doesn't interact with ordinary matter.

Except through gravity

Big relative to our tech. How long ago was it that we thought Earth-like planets were extremely rare? 20 years? 10?

Because you don't notice a well-designed ambush until after it's too late?

My thought also. The cosmic griefer sounds like a pGF problem, not an fGF problem.

Here's an alternative resolution to the Fermi paradox: we haven't heard from aliens, because they are communicating in ways that we are insufficiently advanced to listen for.

Analogy: in 1500, even if we'd thought to listen for aliens, we would not have been able to build radio telescopes.

Perhaps any sensible alien civilization communicates using, say, quantum entanglement. The moment we develop this technology and start listening, a cheery message will come from Alpha Centauri: "what took you guys so long?"

I like this argument. We only had the ability to communicate at range slowly in the visible light spectrum until a few hundred years ago. Would we consider that a worthwhile contact today? An alien race might not consider it worth communicating with someone who can't control gravitational waves.

In theory an alien race would probably have gone through similar stages, though. If they really wanted to communicate with other races at any stage, they would hopefully understand that your best bet is to use repeating bursts in a multitude of frequencies, likely using fundamental constants as a starting point -- Carl-Sagan style.

Not much of a resolution. If our progress continues to accelerate with same rate as of the last 10K years, in 100K years we'll have the capability to change completely the structure of our galaxy. Why can't we see any such grand-scale projects from other civs?

One explanation is that the extrapolation of 'progress' to 'change completely the structure of our galaxy' is false. Just because we've gone from point A to point B in 10k years doesn't mean we'll ever get to point C, no matter however many years. Ie either altering the structure of the galaxy is impossible (as lack of evidence would suggest) or progressing to that level would take even longer, such that no civilization has reached it yet.

Just playing devils advocate here.

The impossibility of changing the structure of the galaxy implies some exciting new physics that would explain why.

Who says we're not that?

Or means of communication that are more energy efficient than radio, which dramatically limits the range from which something can be distinguished from background noise. No-one finds anyone because they all moved to Netflix.

One very simple anti-great-filter theory is that we're simply the first. Someone has to be by definition, it's a small chance but it definitely is a possibility.

Depending on how the universe works we only need to be the first in the galaxy (the chance for which is not that low). Also we can just be in the galactic backwater. there are places on earth we know nothing about. So the idea that we are in a part of the galaxy equivalent of the deep amazonian jungle is also not far fetched.

And the galaxy may be brimming with life - just so alien that we cannot recognize each other.

I always think of dogs, dolphins, and whales when people mention this. Elephants fit in there too. Is there sentience, but just not tool use in our backyard?

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think Apple watches are a pretty neat idea."

I'm partial to the Great Filter being behind us as the evolution of sentience combined with tool use. There has been ample time and opportunity for 'us' to evolve on this planet, yet it took until now. The Dinosaurs were around for nearly 200 million years and got nowhere, and if that rock hadn't hit the Earth 65my ago, we wouldn't be here, and there are many other events which could also have put an end to our line. So my guess is human level intelligence is very, VERY rare, which would be very sad and I hope its not the case.

This is not a theory, but a hypothesis. A small chance is never a good bet, especially when our whole race is at stake.

> A small chance is never a good bet, especially when our whole race is at stake.

That only matters when you can affect the outcome which is not a foregone conclusion.

Instead of one big filter there can be huge number of small filters.

Take a few dozens independent 90% filters together and you got the expected success number in the "1 per observable universe" territory.

Where's the website that has a list of existential threats listed?

Worried about griefer Von Neumann probes today

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