Interesting - quite likely any anlien civilization would not send living creatures to explore space. It's more efficient to send von Neumann probes that can "create factories which will reproduce copies (of) themselves by the thousands", as argued here: http://mkaku.org/home/articles/the-physics-of-extraterrestri...
Exactly right! If our species survives and we are able/willing to explore vast areas of space, then it would be done with tiny factory ships. Would we send 'real AIs' on these tiny factory ships, or limited software?
A fun mental activity: you could posit that life as we know is a von Neumann probe, with simple life supporting each more complex level (from the microbes that made a young Earth's toxic atmosphere oxygen-rich, multicellular machines etc) until you reach the human who, by being able to engineer their local environment, shifts intelligence from biology to machines that are able to coordinate solar-scale engineering, i.e. Dyson swarms, which can power mass-drivers that send out more von Neumann probes lined with organic terraforming seeds thus creating a forever repeating process until the universe sinks into darkness.
It seems strange to make a distinction between organic and created by organic. At an advanced enough stage, couldn't any AI look organic to us?
My take...
1) Over the span of our development, our technology development would look like uncomprehensable magic to someone 1000 years ago. Our ancestors from 100,000 years ago would find us uncomprehensible. Galactic time horizons are billions of years. The odds of our finding life who could comprehend us (and us them) is miniscule.
2) It's hard to fathom the listening not being automated, and using AI. There's just too much space to listen to.
My thoughts exactly. How do we even define "Artificial"? Heck, we can't even define "consciousness" properly.
Is a turtle artificially intelligent? What if a Chimp had titanium atoms instead of carbon? Would that make it AI?
Overall I think it's an absurd question because right now the definition of "AI" is something that we/humans have created. Everything else is natural intelligence.
> What if a Chimp had titanium atoms instead of carbon? Would that make it AI?
Exactly! I've always wondered; If we made advanced enough robots, why would they not count as life?
If they could think, feel, explore, protect themselves, teach each other, affect their environment, process raw materials, build things, if they could make more robots like themselves, all without needing us — fast forward a few hundred years and they had a spacefaring civilization of their own — by WHAT criteria would they NOT classify as "life" in the grand scheme of the Universe?
Just because they won't be made out of organic "cells?"
Think about the reason you can feel something is cold/hot. It's a feeling that is not supposed to exist. Yet, people try to find the particular part or mechanism of the brain causing it, but is a logical circuit really causing such feeling?
It matters, and here's why: natural intelligences, reasonably defined as intelligence evolved through natural selection, can be expected to have some convergent properties. The convergent instrumental goals of resource acquisition and self-preservation naturally arise, of course, but the same is probably said of artificial entities too. Naturally evolved intelligences on the other hand are very likely to have moralities of a recognizable (even if foreign) sort -- the Pareto optimal solutions to resource sharing problems encountered in their ancestral evolutionary environment which likely resembles ours in important respects. These are, in the words of Daniel Dennett, "forced moves" which any evolutionary process is likely to stumble upon regardless of lineage. Artifacts, on the other hand, have no reason to be so constrained.
For an artifact to survive a long time, won't it also undergo a sort of natural selection? Perhaps the only long surviving ai's are those with the exact qualities you ascribe to "naturally" occurring entities. I don't think there is a reason to differentiate intelligences into any natural artificial dichotomy.
Not under similar selection pressures as we underwent during our evolution, and unlike natural selection it would not be limited to neighboring improvements in design space. The range of possible intelligences, and their drives, would be vastly expanded.
Really doubt any extraterrestrial beings would be willing to make contact with us in our current state of development. Maybe if we could go a century without wars or genocide or other atrocities. Honestly unless they want to guide us (ala Childhood's End) I doubt we have anything to offer.
If anything it would just be one of their Von Neumann probes looking to fuel up, probably from Jupiter or Uranus. Maybe it would send some pics of us back to the home world where they might say "oh, those guys look neat, add that one to the inhabited planet catalog"
I don't think life can survive itself in order to become super-intelligent. It's easy to see why we have the Fermi Paradox. Homo Sapiens have been around for say 100,000 years yet the last 200 years, as we have become technological, we have basically destroyed our environment. I think any intelligent lifeform would have a similar path; where the social intelligence lags behind the technological intelligence. We are not mature enough to handle the global problems that we are facing today. Solutions to these problems require the political will on a global, not nationalistic scale and we just are not ready. Hence we are destroying the environment.
So any intelligent life-form would have to survive this period where they have the technical intelligence to create damaging things such as cars, coal-fired power plants, nuclear bombs, etc but lack the maturity and will to manage the bad issues resulting from that technology.
And I can't see how we will create the solutions on a global scale within such a divisive world society. It just won't happen. And any life-form would go thru the same phase.
So life will flourish until technology enters the picture, and then the issues of technology (pollution, over-population, resource depletion, etc.) will happen very quickly and destructively since any life-form would be emotionally ill-equipped to handle them. I mean, how can we construct global solutions when the majority of people still believe in a 'god'. We are still immature apes yet with nuclear bombs.
It would be a rare civilisation that would be able to survive this period. And hence that's why intelligent life-forms would continually rise and fall, but never progressing past a certain level of intelligence.
So whenever I open the newspaper every headline I see in the newspaper points to the birth pangs of a type one civilization information. However, every time I open the newspaper I also see the opposite trend as well. What is terrorism? Terrorism in some sense is a reaction against the creation of a type one civilization. Now most terrorists cannot articulate this. They don’t even know what the hell I’m talking about, but what they’re reacting to is not modernism. What they’re reacting to is the fact that we’re headed toward a multicultural tolerant scientific society and that is what they don’t want. They don’t want science. They want a theocracy. They don’t want multiculturalism. They want monoculturalism. So instinctively they don’t like the march toward a type one civilization. Now which tendency will win? I don’t know, but I hope that we emerge as a type one civilization.
> What they’re reacting to is the fact that we’re headed toward a multicultural tolerant scientific society and that is what they don’t want. They don’t want science. They want a theocracy. They don’t want multiculturalism. They want monoculturalism.
Sadly, you've also described an increasing number of western political conservatives.
Any technical solutions to the global issues we face will be thwarted by sociological factors due to our immaturity as a species. Climate, for example, requires cooperation on a global level and all populous industrialised countries must participate. China, for example, may decide to not participate for any number of economic or political reasons. What then? They would be further destroying the planet. Should we force them to participate since their decision is adversely affecting other nations?
Solutions don't necessarily need everybody to be on board.
Somebody could come up with something tomorrow. Maybe a bacteria that can populate the ocean, which precipitates carbon from CO2 in the air, and drops little pellets to the bottom. Probably not a real practical solution, or even a good idea, but it shows how things could rapidly change if the right tech comes along. They wouldn't need to get everyone together - just a petri dish thrown into the ocean.
We are still thinking of solving today's problems with today's technology, which I agree is futile to get everyone on the same page.
Certainly possible. Problem is that the issues are very diverse. You have increased carbon, over-population, resource depletion, increased toxins in environment, etc, and each would require very different technological solutions. Also, I think solutions such as your bacteria idea would just make us lazy. We wouldn't fix the real issue but would just ultimately rely on technology to solve what are really social issues.
> As far as nuclear bombs, we don't really seem to be using them much anymore.
On the contrary, I think 'we' (the US) use them every day as leverage and a deterrent. We just don't need to detonate them anymore. I think there is more to it than them being just a trump card. You only get to use a trump card once.
Our conventional weapons and economic influence are the leverage and deterrents. It's pretty unlikely that we would ever again nuke a non-nuclear entity. The non nuclear entities know this, so nukes don't really provide any leverage over them. It's our drones, ships, etc. that do, at least on the military side.
For the few entities with nuclear weapons, it's MAD. We would only play the card once, since it would be the final round of the game with that entity.
I think emergence of life is a start of a ticking time bomb. If someone would look at earth from afar and observe the changes on a compressed time scale, one would see the earth 'lighting' up a bit as soon as intelligent life emerges.
Life emerging on a planet is like a bomb's fuse getting lit. The bomb in this case being earth itself with its unique chemical composition. It is only a question of time when this bomb goes off and destroys all life in the process. Maybe the purpose of life is to accelerate and magnify that explosion to achieve the highest possible cosmic reduction of entropy.
Some people argue against this by citing how earth has become relatively peaceful over the last century. I think this is a false belief - earth is in a local minima of violence bought about by the emergence of nation states and nuclear weapons.
The next level of evolution of intelligent life, which will most likely be AI, will bring with it a new wave of violence. First, when AI takes over and fights the humans for dominance, and next if there are multiple AI which emerge and fight over the resources of this solar system.
> It is only a question of time when this bomb goes off and destroys all life in the process.
Or it only affects the planet enough to destroy civilization, and not all life. Or only all high-order life, leaving insects and fish behind. Etc, etc.
The emergence of man has been disastrous for every other life form. We delude ourselves by saving some of them in national parks, but at any point of time they intrude into our living spaces we don't hesitate to wipe them off.
When man dropped the bomb on another city, there was no consideration given for the other life forms which died as a result. This consideration has never been given in any wars man has fought till now, and will not be given when we loose against AI.
It may not be that hard for us to make the Earth unfit for our society, or even for humans as a life form.
However, I think it would be significantly harder for us to wipe out all life on the planet earth. I'm hard pressed to think of anything besides blowing up the planet, or grey goo (and arguably grey goo would just be another form of life).
So every life form seeks to fight for survival and guarantee its existence. When the next life form emerge, maybe in the form of AI, it will lock itself in a war for control of the planet Earth.
This war will be fundamentally a pursuit of energy and resources, as it has always been. And this pursuit of energy and resources has always been detrimental at an exponentially increasing scale to other life forms which depend on the same.
As an example, if there is a nuclear war in the Indian subcontinent, the countries there will only be acting out of their need to guarantee their survival. However, the resulting fallout will have extinguished life forms at a pace that doesnt have any bearing in history.
> Maybe the purpose of life is to accelerate and magnify that explosion to achieve the highest possible cosmic reduction of entropy.
What mechanism would define that purpose? Earth harboring life for a few billion years, and then snuffing itself out, seems completely irrelevant on the scale of cosmic entropy.
Your argument might have merit if intelligent life tends to perform crazy Physics experiments that spawn new universes. Then you'd have an evolutionary feedback loop where universes become tuned for intelligent life.
It is just the direction the universe flows. Life is just a more complex incendiary reaction born out of a certain chemical chemical composition and planetary alignment.
In that sense it is perhaps similar to a volcano that erupt. Both are emergent from the same forces of entropy, but life just takes a non obvious path. Life seeks to burn itself out, the same way a volcano seeks to cool itself.
One wonders if we ourselves are not a step along the way of a genetic algorithm that began with a meteor-riding virus crashing on our fertile primordial world. Sent from?
We are the only known species to propagate out of balance within our local environment. Our brain has this concept of "infinity", which shows up everywhere in our society. Unconstrained growth is in our DNA.
This is not correct. Picture a caterpiller eating all the leaves on a branch -- the only home it has ever known.
That animal is eating it's environment and we might consider that irrational and unsustainable -- right up until the moment where it emerges from a cocoon and flies away to a new world.
I think it's likely intelligent life outside our planet just doesn't, or won't, have any interest in us outside the infinitesimal possibility of a threat.
Consider everything less intelligent than us on our planet... If anything tried to communicate with us, would we even bother trying to figure out what it was trying to say? Would we try to communicate back?
Suppose an octopus stacked rocks in piles of prime numbers (not including unity). Would we care beyond possibly putting it on display in an aquarium?
Yeah, I'd care about that octopus. I would want to study it and see what else it does.
Prime numbers are a consequential concept. Maybe that octopus knows about another consequential concept that we haven't been thinking about for many hundreds of years.
Also, maybe the smartest thing to do if an unknown entity tries to contact you, is to play dumb.
Yeah, I'd care about that octopus. I would want to study it and see what else it does.
Sure, I mean intelligent life is interesting to us because it's novel. If there is other intelligent life in the galaxy (universe), it probably implies that intelligent life is relatively common. So, more (less) intelligent life would be extremely inconsequential to them. Why waste resources studying something already well understood?
That seems remarkably incurious. There are like, tens of thousands of species of bee on earth, and there are tons of people who are out there looking into cataloguing them, studying their behavior, etc.
I suspect that if life is common enough that we're boring to most other forms of intelligent life, we'd probably find at least one or two other species that are interested in us, and if it's rare enough that there's only one or two other species out there, then chances are we're interesting enough that some of their folks would want to visit us and find out our deal.
I personally think life is probably common in the universe. We've only been able to prove exoplanets exist within the last few decades, but the evidence is already that there are a number of planets that are hospitable to life (our kind at least). We've only just started scratching the surface and we've already found things like Tabby's Star [1].
Obviously I think there's a point to us trying to communicate with whatever is out there, I just think we shouldn't be surprised by the lack of response.
Paul aside, we've been ignoring evidence that animals are sentient for centuries now.
So yes - as a general principle, there's a term missing from the Drake equation to cover recognisable similarity, technological equivalence, and mutual interest.
Two civs probably need to be within half a millennium or so of technological development (human time) to have any possibility of communicating.
Considering how old the universe is, it's quite likely civs pass each other by all the time, because larger development differentials aren't visible - literally in one direction, and because of perceived triviality in the other.
Imagine an ant colony in a city, looking for other ant nests, while the city, all the other cities, and the rest of the civ that built the cities can't be imagined by the ants. So even though they're in the middle of a busy civilisation, it's invisible to them.
Two civs probably need to be within half a millennium or so of technological development (human time) to have any possibility of communicating.
Intelligence seems to expand polynomially or exponentially by a lot of measures though (e.g. technology). The closest analogy for us compared to another civilization that could actually receive our radio communication I think would be chimpanzees using sticks to eat termites.
If I had to guess, I'd guess there's probably some kind of technological asymptote, but considering the scale of the universe (more importantly its complexity) I think we are probably nowhere near it.
> Suppose an octopus stacked rocks in piles of prime numbers (not including unity). Would we care beyond possibly putting it on display in an aquarium?
Considering that a lot of research is done on animal communication, I think that's a poor example.
It would just be considered a mating ritual, with some reference to the fact that numerical artifacts in uncommunicative life aren't uncommon (sunflower spirals and Fibonacci).
Then we'd start studying its anatomy for its prime calculator.
Here is the 'plan' as outlined to me by an old dust hippie outside of Gerlach (Warning: totally crap, light speed remains the limiter, but entertaining still the same):
>Humans figure out this brain and AI thing sometime in the next 200 years. So, now 'you' don't need a body or any of that jazz anymore. Brain uploads, that whole shebang, fun times ensue, maybe
>Great, now we start ctrl+C and ctrl+V'ing ourselves a lot, we start getting into the real nitty gritty of physics, chem, bio, math, etc. We get limited by the amount of computers, matter, and energy we can muster. The Earth turns to computronium and heat.
>You know how this ends: We deconstruct the Earth and solar system, send the sun into brown dwarf state and 'colonize' other systems to do the same. The issue is still light speed. More computation is great, but it is the flops that matter. This means that other systems are effectively useless and on their own as it still takes centuries to distribute the computations. You need more plain-jane matter and energy. Bigger systems are primo then. If we go to interstellar war, it will be over very large systems. Still, it's unlikely because...
>Black holes. You fall into one, and time slows down. Boom! You have more flops for no effort. All you have to do is fall into one and have your 'puters on the outside do all the work faster. We super-engineer some craziness and make tiny ones to orbit about. (Note: Now things REALLY fall off into dust hippie-land).
>Cosmic eggs. The black hole is the egg and we are the sperm (yes, this is nutto but fun). We all merge our individual black holes and then we make the 'great journey' to the center of galaxy to all merge with all the other AIs out there. He said it was the only real option. The horizon of the super massive one in the center is the 'flattest' and therefore easiest to orbit and 'choose your time dilation' (I think he meant that it had the smoothest gradient as it was the biggest).
>We are then the first to be intelligent. Dust Hippie then said something that, by this super crazy funland logic, was pretty good. Assuming these time dilation and systems turned into computronium ideas kinda hold water, then we know there are no other super-AIs in the galactic core. This is because we can see many massive suns in very odd orbits about the galactic super black hole. If they were there, went his thinking, then they would set them in better orbits with a constant 'power feed' into the AIs orbiting closely to the black-hole, also they would not be visible to us as they would be enshrouded themselves by computronium, with no radiation wasted on the way out. Not a bad extension of crazy logic, I'd say.
Now, these are all predicated on our current physics know-how and that light speed is as slow as it is. We have great suspicions that this is not true, as our form of matter is ~5% of the total mass-energy budget of the universe and it seems most of the universe is not 'positive' energy (the universe is accelerating in its expansion). Still, its a fun, if likely LSD fueled, theory.
Why should an AI care to spend time near a black hole, in order to 'have more flops for no effort'? That's the same as slowing down the AI's substrate, or putting it into suspend mode. If the non-AIs can survive for centuries, why can't the AIs? In other words, why does the AI care about the "still" in "still take centuries"?
If the AIs have interstellar war, they won't be bogged down in slowtime around a black hole. The ones in fasttime have more chances to control the computronium, and a faster response time to take advantage of whatever those compute cycles are being use for.
I would think there is a high chance that if aliens are capable of listening to us, they would be using AI to do so. After all, within decades of starting to listen for Aliens, we've already made significant progress in AI development.
However, once their AI deciphers what we're saying to them, they'll probably just get annoyed like the FCC and HAM radio operators get annoyed with people mucking around with radio transmissions before knowing the rules.
I thought it was going to be a much more deep article on how we are going to 'create life' and how we might discover it is amazing and will blow our minds.
After aliens or AI see how we treat each other they will probably just sterilize the entire planet with a gamma ray to not expose themselves to such apeness.
69 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadA fun mental activity: you could posit that life as we know is a von Neumann probe, with simple life supporting each more complex level (from the microbes that made a young Earth's toxic atmosphere oxygen-rich, multicellular machines etc) until you reach the human who, by being able to engineer their local environment, shifts intelligence from biology to machines that are able to coordinate solar-scale engineering, i.e. Dyson swarms, which can power mass-drivers that send out more von Neumann probes lined with organic terraforming seeds thus creating a forever repeating process until the universe sinks into darkness.
My take...
1) Over the span of our development, our technology development would look like uncomprehensable magic to someone 1000 years ago. Our ancestors from 100,000 years ago would find us uncomprehensible. Galactic time horizons are billions of years. The odds of our finding life who could comprehend us (and us them) is miniscule.
2) It's hard to fathom the listening not being automated, and using AI. There's just too much space to listen to.
Is a turtle artificially intelligent? What if a Chimp had titanium atoms instead of carbon? Would that make it AI?
Overall I think it's an absurd question because right now the definition of "AI" is something that we/humans have created. Everything else is natural intelligence.
A question of vernacular.
Exactly! I've always wondered; If we made advanced enough robots, why would they not count as life?
If they could think, feel, explore, protect themselves, teach each other, affect their environment, process raw materials, build things, if they could make more robots like themselves, all without needing us — fast forward a few hundred years and they had a spacefaring civilization of their own — by WHAT criteria would they NOT classify as "life" in the grand scheme of the Universe?
Just because they won't be made out of organic "cells?"
> ... "They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."
> "So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."
> "They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."
> "That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat." ...
> "Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?"
> "First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual."
> "We're supposed to talk to meat." ...
> ... Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."
> "I was hoping you would say that."
> "It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"
> "I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?' ...
Don't butcher the title/refrain.
This phrase should defeat them: "Hi, welcome to undefined"
So any intelligent life-form would have to survive this period where they have the technical intelligence to create damaging things such as cars, coal-fired power plants, nuclear bombs, etc but lack the maturity and will to manage the bad issues resulting from that technology.
And I can't see how we will create the solutions on a global scale within such a divisive world society. It just won't happen. And any life-form would go thru the same phase. So life will flourish until technology enters the picture, and then the issues of technology (pollution, over-population, resource depletion, etc.) will happen very quickly and destructively since any life-form would be emotionally ill-equipped to handle them. I mean, how can we construct global solutions when the majority of people still believe in a 'god'. We are still immature apes yet with nuclear bombs.
It would be a rare civilisation that would be able to survive this period. And hence that's why intelligent life-forms would continually rise and fall, but never progressing past a certain level of intelligence.
—Michio Kaku. "Will Mankind Destroy Itself?", 2010
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
Sadly, you've also described an increasing number of western political conservatives.
https://m.mic.com/articles/95234/psychologists-discover-the-...
As far as nuclear bombs, we don't really seem to be using them much anymore. They are just trump cards in the mutual assured destruction game.
Somebody could come up with something tomorrow. Maybe a bacteria that can populate the ocean, which precipitates carbon from CO2 in the air, and drops little pellets to the bottom. Probably not a real practical solution, or even a good idea, but it shows how things could rapidly change if the right tech comes along. They wouldn't need to get everyone together - just a petri dish thrown into the ocean.
We are still thinking of solving today's problems with today's technology, which I agree is futile to get everyone on the same page.
On the contrary, I think 'we' (the US) use them every day as leverage and a deterrent. We just don't need to detonate them anymore. I think there is more to it than them being just a trump card. You only get to use a trump card once.
For the few entities with nuclear weapons, it's MAD. We would only play the card once, since it would be the final round of the game with that entity.
Life emerging on a planet is like a bomb's fuse getting lit. The bomb in this case being earth itself with its unique chemical composition. It is only a question of time when this bomb goes off and destroys all life in the process. Maybe the purpose of life is to accelerate and magnify that explosion to achieve the highest possible cosmic reduction of entropy.
Some people argue against this by citing how earth has become relatively peaceful over the last century. I think this is a false belief - earth is in a local minima of violence bought about by the emergence of nation states and nuclear weapons.
The next level of evolution of intelligent life, which will most likely be AI, will bring with it a new wave of violence. First, when AI takes over and fights the humans for dominance, and next if there are multiple AI which emerge and fight over the resources of this solar system.
Or it only affects the planet enough to destroy civilization, and not all life. Or only all high-order life, leaving insects and fish behind. Etc, etc.
When man dropped the bomb on another city, there was no consideration given for the other life forms which died as a result. This consideration has never been given in any wars man has fought till now, and will not be given when we loose against AI.
However, I think it would be significantly harder for us to wipe out all life on the planet earth. I'm hard pressed to think of anything besides blowing up the planet, or grey goo (and arguably grey goo would just be another form of life).
This war will be fundamentally a pursuit of energy and resources, as it has always been. And this pursuit of energy and resources has always been detrimental at an exponentially increasing scale to other life forms which depend on the same.
As an example, if there is a nuclear war in the Indian subcontinent, the countries there will only be acting out of their need to guarantee their survival. However, the resulting fallout will have extinguished life forms at a pace that doesnt have any bearing in history.
What mechanism would define that purpose? Earth harboring life for a few billion years, and then snuffing itself out, seems completely irrelevant on the scale of cosmic entropy.
Your argument might have merit if intelligent life tends to perform crazy Physics experiments that spawn new universes. Then you'd have an evolutionary feedback loop where universes become tuned for intelligent life.
In that sense it is perhaps similar to a volcano that erupt. Both are emergent from the same forces of entropy, but life just takes a non obvious path. Life seeks to burn itself out, the same way a volcano seeks to cool itself.
We are the only known species to propagate out of balance within our local environment. Our brain has this concept of "infinity", which shows up everywhere in our society. Unconstrained growth is in our DNA.
That animal is eating it's environment and we might consider that irrational and unsustainable -- right up until the moment where it emerges from a cocoon and flies away to a new world.
Consider everything less intelligent than us on our planet... If anything tried to communicate with us, would we even bother trying to figure out what it was trying to say? Would we try to communicate back?
Suppose an octopus stacked rocks in piles of prime numbers (not including unity). Would we care beyond possibly putting it on display in an aquarium?
Prime numbers are a consequential concept. Maybe that octopus knows about another consequential concept that we haven't been thinking about for many hundreds of years.
Also, maybe the smartest thing to do if an unknown entity tries to contact you, is to play dumb.
Sure, I mean intelligent life is interesting to us because it's novel. If there is other intelligent life in the galaxy (universe), it probably implies that intelligent life is relatively common. So, more (less) intelligent life would be extremely inconsequential to them. Why waste resources studying something already well understood?
My point is that intelligent life may have discovered something we don't know already, even if it's dumber than us.
I suspect that if life is common enough that we're boring to most other forms of intelligent life, we'd probably find at least one or two other species that are interested in us, and if it's rare enough that there's only one or two other species out there, then chances are we're interesting enough that some of their folks would want to visit us and find out our deal.
Obviously I think there's a point to us trying to communicate with whatever is out there, I just think we shouldn't be surprised by the lack of response.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Octopus
Paul aside, we've been ignoring evidence that animals are sentient for centuries now.
So yes - as a general principle, there's a term missing from the Drake equation to cover recognisable similarity, technological equivalence, and mutual interest.
Two civs probably need to be within half a millennium or so of technological development (human time) to have any possibility of communicating.
Considering how old the universe is, it's quite likely civs pass each other by all the time, because larger development differentials aren't visible - literally in one direction, and because of perceived triviality in the other.
Imagine an ant colony in a city, looking for other ant nests, while the city, all the other cities, and the rest of the civ that built the cities can't be imagined by the ants. So even though they're in the middle of a busy civilisation, it's invisible to them.
Intelligence seems to expand polynomially or exponentially by a lot of measures though (e.g. technology). The closest analogy for us compared to another civilization that could actually receive our radio communication I think would be chimpanzees using sticks to eat termites.
If I had to guess, I'd guess there's probably some kind of technological asymptote, but considering the scale of the universe (more importantly its complexity) I think we are probably nowhere near it.
Ant 2: "Who knows? That's just the way the universe is."
Man 1: "Man, how do we have all these strange gravity deposits without matter?"
Considering that a lot of research is done on animal communication, I think that's a poor example.
Then we'd start studying its anatomy for its prime calculator.
Well, that explains all the stories about people being anally probed during alien abductions.
My point is still that life less intelligent than us has nothing to communicate to us that we would care to respond to.
>Humans figure out this brain and AI thing sometime in the next 200 years. So, now 'you' don't need a body or any of that jazz anymore. Brain uploads, that whole shebang, fun times ensue, maybe
>Great, now we start ctrl+C and ctrl+V'ing ourselves a lot, we start getting into the real nitty gritty of physics, chem, bio, math, etc. We get limited by the amount of computers, matter, and energy we can muster. The Earth turns to computronium and heat.
>You know how this ends: We deconstruct the Earth and solar system, send the sun into brown dwarf state and 'colonize' other systems to do the same. The issue is still light speed. More computation is great, but it is the flops that matter. This means that other systems are effectively useless and on their own as it still takes centuries to distribute the computations. You need more plain-jane matter and energy. Bigger systems are primo then. If we go to interstellar war, it will be over very large systems. Still, it's unlikely because...
>Black holes. You fall into one, and time slows down. Boom! You have more flops for no effort. All you have to do is fall into one and have your 'puters on the outside do all the work faster. We super-engineer some craziness and make tiny ones to orbit about. (Note: Now things REALLY fall off into dust hippie-land).
>Cosmic eggs. The black hole is the egg and we are the sperm (yes, this is nutto but fun). We all merge our individual black holes and then we make the 'great journey' to the center of galaxy to all merge with all the other AIs out there. He said it was the only real option. The horizon of the super massive one in the center is the 'flattest' and therefore easiest to orbit and 'choose your time dilation' (I think he meant that it had the smoothest gradient as it was the biggest).
>We are then the first to be intelligent. Dust Hippie then said something that, by this super crazy funland logic, was pretty good. Assuming these time dilation and systems turned into computronium ideas kinda hold water, then we know there are no other super-AIs in the galactic core. This is because we can see many massive suns in very odd orbits about the galactic super black hole. If they were there, went his thinking, then they would set them in better orbits with a constant 'power feed' into the AIs orbiting closely to the black-hole, also they would not be visible to us as they would be enshrouded themselves by computronium, with no radiation wasted on the way out. Not a bad extension of crazy logic, I'd say.
Now, these are all predicated on our current physics know-how and that light speed is as slow as it is. We have great suspicions that this is not true, as our form of matter is ~5% of the total mass-energy budget of the universe and it seems most of the universe is not 'positive' energy (the universe is accelerating in its expansion). Still, its a fun, if likely LSD fueled, theory.
If the AIs have interstellar war, they won't be bogged down in slowtime around a black hole. The ones in fasttime have more chances to control the computronium, and a faster response time to take advantage of whatever those compute cycles are being use for.
However, once their AI deciphers what we're saying to them, they'll probably just get annoyed like the FCC and HAM radio operators get annoyed with people mucking around with radio transmissions before knowing the rules.
(Rather than AI just being our servant)