I loved the series, but the physics was horrendous, and I don't agree it made a strong argument for the Dark Forest theory. It made an enjoyable, interesting read about the Dark Forest theory, but the schemes the author used didn't make sense and wouldn't result in the universe as described in the books.
Yeah, the book was about allegories and situations. The plot devices were intended to drive certain plot elements, not to be in the Clarkean way the first principle driving rationale for the work.
Well put - the way he wrote the "science" was fun and used in novel, clever ways to further the interesting situations and ideas and analogies, which is why it was awesome. Plus it was neat reading a book that was first Chinese and then translated. I found the subtle differences in tones and characters fascinating.
The dark forest theory works wonderfully as a plot device in the book. That trilogy is the best sci-fi I've read after Banks, Clarke and Asimov, hands down.
But, if you stop and think about it, in the real universe it has two gaping problems:
First, The Dark Forest theory depends on the capability and willingness to develop world destroying devices.
Second, it depends on the likelihood that the species you detect has not yet spread to other systems. If it has, congratulations, you have started a shooting war with an enemy whose threat level you have no gauge of. Some with an inclination of game theory might want to figure this out through better, though.
> First, The Dark Forest theory depends on the capability and willingness to develop world destroying devices.
Any civilization capable of traveling to another solar system has this capability: just take one of their ships designed to accelerate to significant fractions of the speed of light and decelerate at the other end of the journey, set a course, and simply don't decelerate.
> Second, it depends on the likelihood that the species you detect has not yet spread to other systems. If it has, congratulations, you have started a shooting war with an enemy whose threat level you have no gauge of. Some with an inclination of game theory might want to figure this out through better, though.
There's a good chance the above described weapon would be nearly undetectable and untraceable. For at least the latter half of its journey, it's just a chunk of mass traveling through space, emitting no signals. It would also be only a small factor difference in capability (0-1 more accelerations and decelerations than an actual interstellar transit) to send it from a different part of the galaxy.
Another book in this vein, although distinctly more uncompromising in its conclusion, is The Killing Star, by Charles R. Pellegrino and George Zebrowski.
I loved those books, but the dark forest theory doesn’t make sense. Given a dangerous universe it would make sense for a civilization to try to communicate with other civilizations to create alliances for mutual safety.
The civilizations that are able to forge alliances will tend to out-compete lone wolves.
Liu assumes that it is somehow a lot easier to wipe out a civilization than communicate with it, and that for some reason your civilization has to decide to wipe out another civilization without communicating with it.
alliances put some lower bound constraint on the logistic capabilities and density of the civilisations that form them.
strategically speaking and stunning hostile unknowns a stable civilization controls a territory matching reasonable response time from the ready armies at their combat speed and necessarily a requirement for alliances to form is for these zones to overlap
but if they are at such distance it negates one of the prerequisite for the dark forest theory, that civs are sparse enough for the chance of facing hostiles alone is on par with encountering non hostile civs
Interstellar space isn't an ocean, and star systems aren't countries. Analogies to Earth militaries and navies simply don't apply, the scale of space is too big.
You're not going to form any sort of "alliance" over a distance of light-years, much less consider the fleets of hostile civilizations to be a threat by their proximity the way England once considered Spanish fleets a threat. There's no "reasonable response time" when allies will take years to hear your distress call, and more years to arrive.
> Liu assumes that it is somehow a lot easier to wipe out a civilization than communicate with it...
This may be true, though. We struggle to effectively communicate with creatures on our own planet available in real-time, like dolphins and elephants, who appear to think and have language of sorts.
Launching some relativistic sand at another planet may well be a lot easier.
We seem to communicate pretty well with dolphins, elephants, and other animals. Consider trainers who work with these animals on a daily basis and have rich and productive relationships with them.
We can explain "go press that button" or "lift your leg" fairly well. We can't, as yet, put a dolphin through something like an elementary school level education.
The article does a good job of explaining some of the numbers, but it’s important to remember just how large they are.
To a spacefaring civilization a million years might be the human equivalent of a decade.
The sad truth is that intelligent humans (enough to think and act on thoughts of space travel) have barely existed on the cosmic timeline, and likely won’t live long enough to know the answer to whether or not we’re alone. Not because of some romanticized fermi gate paradoxical reasoning, but simply because we ran out of time.
What do you mean? How is running out of time different from a Fermi gate?
Without a gate, why would time run out? The only natural limits are the time limit to colonize another planet, then another solar system, before our earth and sun lose their ability to sustain life.
Well, even if we're not alone, we must acknowledge that someone had to be first to develop the ability to travel through the cosmos. It may actually be us.
I'd like to think it's at least possible that a life form which made it to the stars without blowing itself up is compassionate enough to leave Earth the heck alone and treat this system as a giant nature reserve. Perhaps they'll swoop in and borrow our tech if we ever come up with anything good, just as we might draw on the natural world for new medicines or construction materials.
And yet, over time, humanity has trended to respecting the life of all sentient creatures. It seems like in the limit, especially if scarcity of resources is eliminated, all life will be precious and valued.
I just googled for how many lab animals are used in reseach in the US, and the number was ~800K in 2017. But (and this is a big but) rats and mice (and birds and fish) are not counted. For some reason, guinea pigs and hamsters are considered more equal than rats and mice.
One supplier of lab mice in Maine provides ~3 million mice per year...
Yearly production (and slaughter) of chickens is something like 60+ billion. Not sure if sentient, but perhaps they deserve it as descendants of the dinosaurs that terrorized human ancestors...
We already have that ability. It's just that this travel is insanely slow and requires the energy levels that we can't easily produce in those timescales. It is quite possible (I would even say likely) that any faster travel is not very viable, and it might never be possible to make any kind of FTL engine.
I don't buy this argument. Let's pretend for a moment that there are currently 5-20 intelligent species in our galaxy, and everyone except us developed deep space ships and successfully colonized thousands of other planets (make up almost any numbers you want here; the results still hold).
What would our telescopes see? It seems like we would most likely see exactly what we see today.
The probability that one of those ships happened to fly anywhere close to our solar system, while we were looking, is still vanishingly small. Omnidirectional radio transmissions spread so quickly that they fall below the noise floor almost instantly over interstellar distances.
Space is really really really really big. We can see stars. We can just barely see some planets in a few very specific configurations. We can sometimes make coarse estimates of the chemical composition of those planets. And that's about it. We don't really know how to detect life on extrasolar planets. The ones we've already found could be teeming with life and we wouldn't know it.
“A telescope about 51,075 ft (15,568 m) in diameter would be required to resolve the Upper stage from Earth. A smaller one could see him as an unresolved dot, about 98.2 ft (29.9 m) in diameter, in ideal conditions”
Not necessarily, the apparent magnitude is the issue here, not resolving power. Located at a comparable distance, Deimos, the smaller moon of Mars, reaches at most magnitude ~12.5, meaning that any telescopes smaller than 6" to 8" might not even be able to ever detect it's there. And we're talking about a 6.2Km sized moon, not an object with an overall visible area ~40000 times smaller - that would mean an apparent magnitude of ~23-24 as seen from Earth, meaning only the most powerful telescopes on Earth would be barely able to detect that "unresolved dot" - provided it had the same albedo of Deimos.
The angular resolution of a telescope scales as the size of the diameter of the telescope, essentially [0]. Meaning that if you want to image the roadster in visible light, you need a telescope lens about the size of Washington DC (currently). To just see it at all you need a lens about the size of a McMansion.
To image something like the roadster on a Planet orbiting Vega (~26 LY away, furthest star anyone on Earth could visit and then return from in a lifetime) you're looking at lenses greater than the orbit of Pluto, ish.
Optics/Physics is a bitch here. To really see/prove there are aliens running about, they have to screaming at the top of their lungs for a very very long time, hoping against hope that anyone will hear. It's just really really hard to build equipment that can passively listen for accidental broadcasts and spy on alien cars. At least under our current understanding of physics.
To an observer who is self-propelled (and has enough energy), the speed of light (as seen by others) is no limit. It's not like you can fire your thrusters and NOT gain momentum and speed; or that, as you accelerate, the stars start passing by at the speed of light, and suddenly your ship jerks, ceasing to accelerate, because you hit an invisible velocity brick wall.
Yes, relativistically, you can travel anywhere in the Universe and only have seconds pass for your frame of reference. But I thought that Vega was the furthest star that you could travel to and from and then still have people you knew here on Earth that were alive. Also, I was totally wrong about Vega. I think that was my reading of Contact that gave me the thought. There are a LOT of systems that are inside of 30 LY from the Sun: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_systems_within_25...
The thing is, why "5-20"? That's a super narrow range. The parameters would have to be tuned to a very small degree to produce just a handful of technological species in a galaxy.
A much larger range of the parameter-space could produce either thousands+ of technological species (which we have pretty good evidence is not the case) or less than one on average pretty galaxy.
I think you could increase the guess to 1,000 or 1,000,000 species and the outcome would still be basically the same.
We do not know how to detect life outside of our solar system. The only way our measurements would change is if one of them literally landed on top of us.
Well, we know how to detect laser and radio transmissions. If there are thousands, tens of thousands, millions of species out there right now, we've looked at several of their stars.
And if there are all these technological species, we would expect some of them to be much more advanced than we are. Why haven't some of them noticed us?
You can come up with possible answers to these questions, it's just that those answers look less likely than, "those species aren't actually out there."
Further, think about how powerful a transmission has to be in order to not be drowned out by the power of a star. A laser would have a far higher chance (yet still hugely powerful to cross the distance), but only if aliens found us and pointed a laser directly at us.
Consider that we have, ourselves, gotten far harder to detect over the last fifty years. Energy spent accidentally sending signals into space is wasted. And we are making much greater use of cryptography and compression schemes, which would make signals look like pure noise.
So, question: how strong does an undirected, random signal need to be to be reasonably detected at 10 light years away?
Yes, that's another example of tuning the parameter-space for a possible answer, just an unlikely one. Yes, maybe the Milky Way is just chock full of highly advanced technological species who have all made themselves very hard to detect and none of whom have any interest in communications with other intelligent life.
But a simpler explanation that has many more paths to being true is "there's nothing out there."
To be clear, I don't think the evidence suggests near-certainty here. I wouldn't say that there's a 99% chance that we're alone in the galaxy. But it's also not a wide open field. There is some evidence, and so far that evidence suggests that we're likely alone.
I think your assumptions about what is hard and what is easy to detect need some recalibrating.
Alien life forms wouldn't need to use technology to make themselves harder to detect. It's extremely difficult by default.
They would need to use technology to deliberately spread a message in a way that is at all likely to be detectable, and even then would still have to get quite lucky.
Even more basic than that, why do we think radio/photons are the most efficient/effective way to communicate for an advanced civilization? Why would they be using them in the first place?
We already know neutrinos can travel through most mass, so modulating those would let you transmit through the Earth and Sun with lower latency and without a repeater constellation routing around the object.
Whatever aliens might be using to transmit information is likely more advanced than we're able to detect.
Well, that should be just temporary before our real mega engineering projects get started. Hard to not notice those, even just by the expected heat signatures.
Encrypted data does not look like noise. It looks very very different from noise. If not, the entire concept of communications engineering wouldn't exist. We're always looking for the next sharply bounded filter.
Certain deer do, certain deer dont. Also, feel free to use a lower animal if that abstraction works better for you. My point is that if humans are some out of the way primitive life form it might make sense why aliens may know of us but not contact us (as in, there may be no purpose to explicitly contact us, as humans dont generally try to explicitly contact every deer herd).
It is not that humans are technologically primitive (which we are), it might be we are too intellectually/capacity primitive to be seen as "contact" worthy.
We know how to detect laser / radio transmissions pointed at us.
You can't see a laser transmission off-axis if there aren't any stray photons reaching your detector - that's just physics.
You can't detect a radio signal below the noise floor without some a priori knowledge about the statistics of the signal.
These aren't justifications, these are simply facts about the current limits of our ability to detect far-away signals. These limits suggest that millions of far-away worlds could be extremely chatty between themselves, but unless they decided to point a transmitter at us, we would be none the wiser.
You shouldn't use a measurement that looks identical for case A and case B to decide which one is more likely.
I appreciate seeing your comments. The Fermi paradox and these similar ideas seem the modern equivalent to assumptions the sun revolves around the earth. We need more research and infrastructure in this solar system to really progress on this.
Imagine if we had thousands of microsats in orbit around the various planets that we could triangulate data amongst? We need to be more aware of our solar system before we can even make reasoned arguments about life within it alone.
> before we can even make reasoned arguments about life within it alone.
That's an excellent point, for all we know we have intelligent, non-spacefaring life right in our solar system. It's unlikely, but there's still plenty of oceans, gas giant atmospheres and lava tubes that we haven't looked at yet.
Why would they stop at thousands of colonies? What is it preventing the colonies from themselves creating colonies? Also, realize that a colony in the system of another star will move away from the originating system. In our neck of the galactic woods the rate of separation is typically about 10^-4 c, so in a million years they'd separate by 100 light years.
I think you could change these guesses to be almost whatever you wanted with similar results.
We would not observe anything different unless one of them actually flew to our solar system and tried to contact us. That's how bad we are at detecting distant life.
True, but without radio transmissions, I bet we would spend decades arguing about whether it was actually an asteroid and a measurement anomaly. We can't really distinguish a rock from a Battlestar at those distances without physically flying over to look.
At this point we're relying almost exclusively on radio waves to detect any traces of intelligent life out there. So whether they're building moon stations in their neighborhood, or sending rockets here and there, we'd still look for their transmissions to identify their existence and to tell them apart from a random natural event.
And while intelligent life may exist on a planet for millions of years, their window of actually emitting something into the void in a manner we can detect with our tech today [0] will probably be a lot shorter than that.
This gives us a relatively tiny and limited visibility window into the history of life out there. Unless we manage to sync our window perfectly with theirs we'll never know they existed.
Compounded by the fact that advanced space communications would likely rely mostly on laser beams[1], whose efficiency and general design fits much better with that environment and its infrastructure. Unless pointing directly at your instrument (good luck, what are the odds?) and missed by the intended receiver, the beam will never reach you anyway.
[1] Particularly if your operation is covert, discrete, observational, non-disruptive: you'd want to avoid signaling your presence in all directions, while wasting 99.99% of that energy away from your intended receiver. It's just military efficiency, a photon-VPN so to speak, that you'd need to "physically MitM" to hack.
You really mean anything at least comet/asteroid sized, passing within the inner Solar System with a speed and an albedo that would make it stand out against the background of stars (reaching at least say, apparent magnitude 8-10). Also, note that it should be found near the ecliptic plane, to improve the chances of detection.
Now, exchange that for a black-ish ship a few hundred meters sized, quietly coming from Vega to visit say, Saturn. Nobody would probably notice it coming and going, despite Saturn being one of the most popular targets of the entire sky.
You'd be surprised how much stuff there is just in our neighborhood that we're unable to catch, yet. We mostly track dangerous stuff, the big enough - fast enough to destroy us, and we now have probably in the 6-7 figures objects tracked in the inner solar system. That's it. Elusive 9th planets and other major 'quests' are shots in the dark so far, mostly — read accounts on why they target some region of the sky, how narrow our observational capabilities are as we can only point to a very specific direction at a time with each telescope, etc.
So, some alien unmanned probe the likes of Voyager in large orbit around the Sun? Yeah, no chance in hell we'd detect that by random chance, we'd have to seriously upgrade our space infrastructure to even pretend 'monitoring' our close vicinity, let alone post-Jovian space. And we have virtually no knowledge of about half the distance between interstellar medium and the Sun, that's how limited we are to even modeling the closest star systems.
Edit: apparently double-post with aruggirello; I agree with him.
To underline this point: we shot a red tesla into space about 2 years ago [1]. We cannot detect it any more. We'd need a telescope with a mirror of 15km to see it. Due to uncertainties accumulating, even if we'd had a scope like that, we'd probably not be able to point it exactly enough.
Oh, and that thing is mostly between the orbits of Mars and earth - much smaller search space than "the entire solar system"
You’re very mistaken. We still regularly find 300ft boulders in _Earth Orbit_. And routinely find city sized asteroid in asteroid belt and state sized minor planet in Kuiper belt. Suggesting that a ship can be found as long as it’s in Solar Orbit is an extremely misinformed opinion.
It's entirely possible that a civilization would stop at thousands of colonies because, they no longer have the technological capacity (having regressed for whatever reason) or the desire to continue further. It's also possible that the odds against successfully expanding beyond a single colony are so great that no one ever makes it to a thousand.
We're on the edge of a global environmental collapse, and most of our civilization's knowledge is being kept on the internet of all places.
Also, we were able to land men on the moon 50 years ago, and now that knowledge is basically gone, and the tapes lost, and people are starting to believe the Earth is flat and that the moon landing never even happened.
Meanwhile, we can still read tax records from ancient Sumeria because they were carved into clay.
Complex systems are always more fragile than simple ones. It seems to me like we've been standing on a house of cards for the last century.
But your argument requires that all these branches, separated by light years, collapse, and then stay collapsed forever. The counterargument does not require that they progress exponentially forever. They can go through cycles, even extinctions, but the remnants can pick themselves up and go on.
Your scenario requires a uniformity of outcome across all the parts of that civilization, spread across multiple stars, and spread across all future time. They all have to go down and stay down.
They don't have to "collapse," merely remain at a point of stability that doesn't allow for the energy expenditure and infrastructure of interstellar travel. That's not an unlikely scenario.
Stability is achieved by having excess capacity, then limiting use of that capacity. Societies are not stable due to being right up at their limit; such societies collapse because of external changes push them over the limit.
So, if a stable multistellar society is not building colony ships, it's not because it can't, but because it has chosen not to. How does that uniformity of choice get enforced across time and space?
There is some point to that. We are perfectly adapted to our planet because it formed us. Colonists on another planet may not find the same perfect conditions and it's likely that even to get a partial match (say Mars like conditions) they'd have to be many, many light years away from each other, with little outside support. And they'd need to adapt to colony ship life first, then to life on another planet.
They'd more or less evolve completely independently and it's conceivable that having these limitations will mean they never reach the same potential as the original humans did on Earth.
Usually the comparison with colonists of the past pops up. But they had the distinct advantage of being perfectly adapted to the planet and many civilizations still perished. Seeding another planet with humans raises a lot the bar for successfully developing a thriving civilization capable of reaching the levels required to further spawn successful colonies.
And a philosophical thought: would they even still be humans after (tens of) millennia away from the home of humanity, in vastly different conditions from the ones that evolved us? Would they be "our" thousands of colonies?
I don't believe there is, or can be, such a thing as a stable multi stellar society. Barring FTL technology, it's impossible to correlate activities or maintain coherent relationships when every interaction takes years, decades or centuries.
What you have are individual civilizations which may or may not, as you mention, decide to invest the time and resources into interstellar travel. But that investment isn't guaranteed. We've had the technology to send out interstellar probes for decades, yet we haven't committed to sending them out by the hundreds or thousands. We could have colonized Mars or the Moon by now, built Orion starships, but we haven't. Technology doesn't govern the advance of space travel, politics does.
>How does that uniformity of choice get enforced across time and space?
I think it's just a matter of probability. I don't believe technological development, much less to the degree of having a space program, are an inevitable result of intelligence or the presence of civilization. It's easier not to have a space program. It's easier, if you have a space program, to only explore your own solar system. Any number of issues, such as not being near enough to a colonizable star, not having sufficient energy or resources, natural disaster, giant ants, robot uprising, superflu, etc. could keep a civilization from starting, much less maintaining, a project of the necessary magnitude for the necessary amount of time.
And then you have to survive the trip, and actually succeed at colonizing another planet.
I think it's entirely within the bounds of reason for every civilization which has attempted interstellar travel to have failed up to this point.
We don’t know how fragile technological civilisations are because we’ve only got one example. It’s reasonable to say the technological civilisations are highly specialised, and it’s not unreasonable to suggest that excessive specialisation is fragile as we have many examples of that in the form of biological speciation.
However, the economic cost of making an interstellar colonisation ship is so vast, that from where we are it seems reasonable to assume that anyone who does it has fully automated manufacturing and resource gathering – or, to put it another way, they are post-scarcity. If you’re post-scarcity, then you’re no longer fragile, because you can have a complete backup of everything you need, including the skills needed to rebuild.
Of course, there’s lots of ways for things to go wrong, and if I were to imagine badly written control software that means the fully automated manufacturing kills everyone, I’d be accused of being too derivative rather than implausible…
We don’t know that; we have a sample of approximately N=1ish (depending on what you want to define as a civilisation or a collapse) and we’re not done yet.
I wouldn't assume that colonies would have anywhere near the technical capabilities of the seeding planet.
Just look at what we have achieved in Earth vs. what we have achieved on the moon, or anyone's plans for a Mars colony. Mankind may set for on Mars eventually, but i don't think we'll ever do something like set off fireworks there.
Any colony that moves past the immediate survival stage is a success. That does not mean they have millions of years of fossil fuel stored to start further exploration.
generating methane from co2 and electricity is fairly easy, mining helium from jupiter too. Once you have self sustaining colony on mars it can colonise the rest of the solar system far easier than earth can.
If our technology continues to improve, future humans could be looking at life spans of thousands of years if they are not killed by accidents.
I assume that it will require population control, because we will not be able to find enough habitable planets to keep up with the growth we have today. Basically a choice of "immortality" or procreation. This will also set a limit to how many colonies that are practical to create.
Also some may not accept the risks of travelling to other solar systems. Why risk dying "young" when you can expect to live for thousands of years?
Well, if you combine these advances even with basic artificial habitat building at reasonable scale(Oneil cylinders, world houses, covered craters, cavern cities, asteroid habitats, etc.) you should be able to house all these people quite easily.
If all these long living people dont have to much new children (and might not be able to ? eq. if fully digitized or with body fully replaced with mechanical parts), it might be even easier.
Why would we stop at a hundred of colonies? A couple of observations:
- in rich countries, the trend is that the birth rate is declining, the population gets "older". There seems to be a link between wealth and birth rate. Even if space conquest gives us a lot of resources, if that trend persists, the lack of people will be the limiting factor.
- there are only really two reasons to go out: curiosity and making sure that a stellar-scale catastrophic event doesn't wipe out our civilization. A bunch of colonies "far enough" from Sol achieves this. And probably after visiting a dozen of systems, the next one will look like one of the previously visited.
The curiosity aspect might be generational. After growing for enough generations, the critical mass of "curious" individuals - people who are persecuted, who don't fit into the prevailing culture, or who are just really bored - might be there for exploring outwards, even if it had already been done many time before.
That's the general story of humanity. From the first settlements to the ever-away "final frontier" — somewhere between Moon and Mars as we speak. There is no doubt in the mind of any historian, psychologist or sociologist, IMHO, that we'll probably keep doing this for as long as we are "homo sapiens sapiens". That should be ~50K years total based on past mutations (iirc? anyhow much bigger than recorded history), so I figure we can take curiosity for granted as a civilization trait for next-gen politics. Like, lots of gens. ;-)
Since I'm no historian, psychologist, etc. I have always believed that great migrations were caused by local population pressure - id est too few resources for too many people. Even Columbus stumbled upon Americas because he was looking for a better trade route.
You could argue that exploration, migrations, colonization are but the emergent/complex behaviors described by more fundamental principles in psychology, sociology, biology. Conway's game of life, in a way. History being a mere factual, chronological account — a log.
You are thereby operating at a high-level, manipulating complex umbrella objects like "great migrations", "local population pressure", each of whose words (composite concepts) map to lower-level datapoints — e.g. like some eternal tension (psy., soc., hist., bio...) between a desire to look inwards (for security? familiarity? survival, support?) and a drive to seek outwards (for growth? curiosity? lack, want, need?)
The problem with endless expansion is it requires stability over very long time scales. Sending a probe to another solar system is hardly enough. If you can send a ship say 100 light years from your home planet that’s 2,000+ repetitions of terraforming and colonizing a planet, building up an industrial base, then sending ships to every planet in reach. Under ideal conditions that might take 10,000 years assuming everything went well so you need 20 million years to colonize our galaxy. But, assuming everything goes well for 20 million years and colonization continues to be a priority seems unlikely.
It’s very possible to reach a wall where zero teraformable planets are within reach of your ships. For large civilizations that’s unlikely to totally block expansion, but it might make the path very convoluted thus increasing total time by a rather extreme factor.
Culture rot will kill you quicker than density of colonisable planets.
The transport layer is the easy part. Content integrity is a much harder problem.
All of your probes and colony ships have to reproduce the source culture - or some viable subservient spin-off - with 100% accuracy.
This explicitly means 100% reproductive success of all features, especially the politics and economics, with no errors.
For a successful colony, stability and conformity have to be maintained for long periods - centuries at a minimum, perhaps even millions of years.
And of course this assumes the source culture is stable in the first place.
Otherwise you're just seeding the galaxy with potential competitors, and/or setting up some kind of galactic Battle Royale.
I'm bemused by the suggestion the first option is actually possible. The second seems more likely, but might not be considered a success in the sense of creating a stable galaxy-spanning civ capable of common strategic goals.
> All of your probes and colony ships have to reproduce the source culture - or some viable subservient spin-off - with 100% accuracy.
The only thing that needs to be preserved is the desire to build more colonies. I'll grant even that's a stretch, but demanding 100% cultural fidelity is silly for discussing the Fermi paradox.
Not just the desire, but also the ability- the cultural context for an industrial base potentially far more powerful than what we have. That may be extremely difficult to sustain over such timescales.
Even on earth we had plenty of colonies rebelling against the founding nation, gaining independence and becoming a serious competitor. Britain might conclude that they would be better off today had they never colonized America and India. Repeat this pattern often enough over millennia and it seems plausible that an entire race might become very cautious with forming permanent colonies.
Britain had to colonize the Americas or France and Spain would have without them. It would take another 200 years for the empire to fully collapse. It’s hard to say colonization was a net negative just because of America’s independence.
Further it seems much less likely the populace would be so willing to send aide to Britain during WWI if it weren’t for the cultural similarities. If instead Spain had colonized the US it seems very likely the country would have remained neutral as Spain did.
My gut feeling would say colonization was a net positive to Britain, but it's hard to say. It's just too big of a what-if. The US would have likely gone to France, their main rival at the time. On the other hand Britain spend a lot of resources on their US colonies, both building them and fighting France in America. Who knows what else they could have with those resources.
It's not just the US either. India was a profitable colony at the time but might turn out to be a major detriment to Britain overall, both as a source of cheap skilled labor and as a powerful nation of their own. Who knows what would have happened without the British. A lot of the borders in the Middle East are drawn by Britain as part of their WWI mandates/colonies, and the problems from how those borders were drawn spill over into Britain (yes, it's not the only problem in the Middle East by a long shot, but it's one of them).
I still think overall Britain came out ahead (just look at Hong Kong for what cultural influence can do), but it's not hard to imagine how colonization might be seen as a net negative if a few times things turned out even slightly worse.
Britain seeded the Earth with English speakers that inherited her legal traditions and cultural values for the most part that then developed into rich trading partners that participate in an international system of voluntary exchange that has enriched the British.
It could have gone another way, there’s a reason we’re talking about Britain instead of England and Scotland, but I would say it has worked out brilliantly.
> The only thing that needs to be preserved is the desire to build more colonies
That's hard. I'd say harder than solving the physical problems of interstellar travel. Once a generation has learned to live with the limited resources of a starship, living with the limited resources of a planet is going to be a very attractive option. What's their incentive to colonize more from there?
It's always going to be a small percentage that desires to venture further out to new areas. On a newly settled planet, most will not want to leave. But some will.
But you have to wait for that society to forget that living on a starship means spending your whole life never venturing out, while a planet lets you spend your life exploring.
Or, you know, some just want to get away from the other individuals.
That is, if we are talking about something comparable to current humans. Immortal super AIs might don't care about idling in the void for a few million years, just for the opportunity to re-sync those gained experiences to their decentralized knowledge a few million years down the line. I really like the single omnipotent AI scenario, since being immortal and not depending on others changes quite drastically what strategies can be successful - it won't be anything like human kings who need to keep their subjects at bay and working for them to support their power and limited life. But we shouldn't restrict our imagination, if we are talking about possibilities and galactic time-spans.
The important part is, as mentioned by GP, the desire to expand, since this is a dominant strategy. In comparison, not every living being on earth has the drive to participate in evolution by e.g. creating offspring. Those usually just drop out of the "game" and likely won't matter in the long term, at worst making it a bit harder for the others initially till their disappearance. What matters are those who have persistent impact... e.g. by colonizing/making offspring.
In the long run resource shortage goes down. Technology increases the amount of output possible for a given amount of effort over a given amount of matter. For example: wood to coal to oil to nuclear. Thinking about starships of 3000 AD we're talking about a thousand years of scientific development towards nuclear reactors, food processing, scientific computing, and random technologies I can't even fathom because they'll rest on a bed of mathematics and physics that's not even conceivable yet.
If more technologically advanced aliens exist then our not sensing them is much more likely because they don't want to be sensed than some other consideration like them stopping to setup on some habitable planet. I'm horrified about war, and I'd hope they would be too, but it may be that aliens come to understand species or ecosystems in a more expansive way and may consider the process of ending war as a necessary one for the maturation of an ecosystem.
Or the great filter is true. We all end up killing ourselves because it's impossible to escape exponential technology growth and mismatched incentive problems, or something else like that.
If human history suggests anything, it would be that at a certain point invading other colonies will become more profitable than founding new colonies in sub-optimal locations.
Invading another star system of similar technology levels without FTL seems like non starter. You could sterilize planets, but space based assets are another story and retribution is possible.
Yes. Invading ships wouldn't be able to bring a lot of fuel/propellant with them beyond what's necessary to decelerate from the trip. And they would have to be warm enough to support life, so they'd radiate a lot of heat. They'd be easy to spot. So no fancy maneuvering and no stealth. And the defenders have the resources of an entire star system to throw at you.
Terrorism, as you mention, might be possible (but again remember, no stealth) and claim jumping (where you displace another group that got there roughly when you did). But even in densely packed stellar neighborhoods the average star is surrounded by a moat several light years across. Once the locals are developed enough to mount a serious defense, they're probably immovable.
Invaders might not need to bring anything with them at all. Particularly relevant to your point, I'll share one of the military projects from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKcEwUcVBHs
More generally, the point I'm raising is symbolized in entirety by the Spartan faction's ideology in that narrative environment.
You still lose to the first-mover advantage though. If universal assemblers are possible, then the defender with the resources of a star system at their disposal and early warning of the attack is going to outproduce the aggressor.
The only advantage I imagine an invader would possess is the possibility of taking control of the Lagrange points and any orbital production facilities, and then besieging the population below.
Dropping asteroids on habitable worlds and causing ice ages to clear out the population _might_ still be faster/cheaper than terraforming a semi-hostile world.
That assumes the Lagrange points are empty. A civilization capable of interstellar war is going to have a lot of space based assets.
Further starship drive capable of reaching a significant fraction of the speed of light make one hell of a weapon. But you still need to deal with space based assets that can dodge your initial bombardment and at a minimum are armed with powerful engines. So sure you can destroy planetary populations etc, but now your still out gunned 1,000:1 locally and pissed off a civilization capable of doing the same thing to you. Net result MAD.
A large technical advantage may make up for this, but that means the winner has better tech is much harder to take over a second time. On top of this the only thing worth shipping between stars is information at the speed of light. Making conquest largely pointless without FTL.
> On top of this the only thing worth shipping between stars is information at the speed of light.
It could be worthwhile to beam energy out to interstellar distances (also at the speed of light). This is probably needed for interstellar travel anyway.
And that doesn't need to happen with anywhere near 100% accuracy. If 1% of the offspring multiplies and works to found new colonies that barely changes the dynamics or speed of spreading.
> For a successful colony, stability and conformity have to be maintained for long periods - centuries at a minimum, perhaps even millions of years.
The number one attribute that needs to be preserved is the disinclination to blow each other to smithereens. I suspect self-destruction (to a level where technological progress is setback millenia) is a common enough occurrence that would occur well-before FTL becomes a possibility.
I also suspect (despite decades of reading SF and my own wishes to the contrary), that the kinds of attributes that encourage exploration, expansion and risk-taking, are also somehow linked to aggression and violence - "might makes right".
Implying culture as we have it may be a stretch too big for other species. Who may form single integral units like a zerg swarm. Yeah, it is a game fiction, but you got the idea. Why do cells split and grow with no complaints about their life? Because it is the way they are, and if they were not, they simply didn’t. What is their strategic goal? A counterargument to this is that swarm may be not intelligent enough to make it, but my point is that our lifeform’s culture is not the only one possible, and the culture as we have it may be not a requirement. (Not that it is any sort of beauty anyway. Apart from particular individuals, it is mostly disgusting and ineffective.)
Also, a neighbor idea of the scientific progression in thousand years from now on doesn’t account for an artificial biology progression, like the same humans in 1k years would do unimaginable things. Would they be still individual humans? Personally I don’t think it is more than juvenile civilization’s tunnel vision illusions.
If you can create ship, which can travel for generations, why you need to colonize anything? For second generation, their home will be starship, not a planet.
> All of your probes and colony ships have to reproduce the source culture - or some viable subservient spin-off - with 100% accuracy.
Any empire/political system/civilization needs some means of holding it together. Traditionally this is done through armies. As our transport technology has gotten better, our ability to move armies around the world has increased and with it the ability to control large economic systems without them breaking apart. Nowadays we have a globe-spanning economy. However, time scales of interstellar travel are so big that cultural change is much faster than the method to build a colony. By the time that nuclear bomb ship has arrived at the other planet, we might have changed our mind threefold.
In fact, already if you send a generational spaceship to a star 100 ly away to reach its destination in a thousand years, by the time you receive message from their arrival, both their as our language will have evolved by 1100 years. So yeah you are right, cultural decay (or rather "change") is a big problem.
Currently our governments are run by humans with all the human failings. Instability, corruption, etc are components of the governments due to our human nature. You are right that it would be hard for human run governments to colonize the galaxy as due to the light speed limit, we can't achieve transport scales needed for a human-run civilization.
However, we won't need humans to run the governments. In the future we'll be able to engineer and build extremely intelligent AI systems with multiple layers of error checking to withstand decay for trillions of years. You think that sounds undoable? Check how many cells humans are made out of and how well they work together for decades.
The unsolvable political problem will just be turned into a solvable engineering problem.
Those AI systems would run key parts of the governments and economies themselves (entirely without needing human help) and enforce a set of basic rules like preventing nuclear weapons, bioweapons, torture, etc alongside ensuring they are the most powerful factor in those places, i.e. are able to fend off any kind of attack. Otherwise they won't interfere with human matters and let humans govern themselves with the human imperfections.
Basically, they'd provide the "galactic federation layer" and ensure peace through their programming. Some factors of their programming could be changed by the human population, but others, like preventing nuclear weapons, couldn't. So even if the humans wanted, they wouldn't be able to wage catastrophic war with the neighbour planet, or at least specific types of war (allowing trade war but not allowing nuclear war). Even if the risk for interplanetary war is just 0.1% per year, over millennia that's a large number and interplanetary war can have major consequences.
To the present reader, those AI systems probably seem weird and dystopic, but I think we are already evolving towards them. Already, many parts of the governments and economies of various countries are being automated. One day in the future the automation will have minimized human involvement enough so that you can think about von Neumann probes.
The first people to develop AI ran governments will probably be the dictatorships who want absolute control and micromanagement (single-operator government). But in general, the systems are more efficient than chaotic systems, and with increasing perfection of the technology, once a system is a dictatorship, it probably won't change back to a non-dictatorship without outside interference. It's important to eventually remove human control from them as otherwise over the millions of years, eventually someone will figure out how to flip the switch and create dictatorships. So it's kinda important to get the "right" set of rules into these computers.
Already building these computers is a huge project that would take a long time to get it right. But it's an easier task for humans ...
>In fact, already if you send a generational spaceship to a star 100 ly away to reach its destination in a thousand years, by the time you receive message from their arrival, both their as our language will have evolved by 1100 years.
It is not necessarily true that more time is spent aboard a ship than light would spend taking the same path, as measured by an external observer.
If you had a ship capable of accelerating at 1g indefinitely, then as measured by the crew, they could cross the galaxy in only 24 years.
That’s irrelevant for people on the planet sending the spaceship.
Particle physics get matter to 99.9999% of c which causes crazy time dilation to the particles and nothing to the scientists. Further, constant 1g acceleration of a starship to high fractions of c is basically science fiction. Not even matter anti matter reactions can keep up those energy demands for very long.
I don't understand how this is possible. To accelerate the spaceship at 1g becomes more and more difficult as you approach the speed of light. That's the whole point of relativity. And yet the article says "the spaceship will approach the speed of light in the middle of its journey, as measured from the planet's frame of reference".
It only becomes "more difficult" as measured by people not onboard the spaceship. For people onboard, time effectively speeds up for the rest of the universe, so that there is no brick wall to your acceleration. Therefore, it's also possible to time travel into the future, but not into the past.
That is not how it works from what little I know. Neither the spaceship, nor the outside observers will EVER see it hit the speed of light. That is the only constant thing they agree on. All of relativity hinges on this point. The Lorentz transformation is based on the fact that the speed of light is constant for all observers whether they're "stationary" or moving at 0.999999999c . So even at very high fractions of light speed, you know for a fact that you haven't hit light speed because when you turn on your spaceship's lights, the photons will look like they're travelling away from you at the speed of light (due to the own time dilation and length contraction you experience).
This is why when you're calculating the actual value of time dilation, it considers what fraction of speed of light you're traveling. Because if you were the traveler, time dilates and length contracts EXACTLY enough to make light appear to travel at 1c (regardless of your own speed).
Time dilation is only 1/2 the story. The other half is distance measurements get distorted.
People in the spaceship see the same maximum velocity of objects they pass aka c. However, if a huge measuring tape with say light year tick marks passing them they are going to measure it’s speed at say .99 c and the time between tick marks is X. Alternatively, at .999c they would get a new time period Y. However the difference between X and Y is not simply .999/.99 but rather a more complex relativistic adjustment.
However, this is only important for people on the spaceship. For people staying home the it takes 3.5x the energy to hit .999c vs .99c yet it’s only shaving 1% off the observed travel time. Which is unlikely to be considered worth it by just about any civilization baring significant changes to the laws of physics.
> Time dilation is only 1/2 the story. The other half is distance measurements get distorted.
Yes, that's why I mentioned length contraction. They're results of the same transformation I believe. So they're directly related. Same as mass and every other supposed "constant" in newtonian mechanics.
No, endless expansion does not require stability over very long time scales. It just requires that each colony produce, on average, at least one successful daughter colony. It's not even necessary for the colony to have any cultural continuity between when it is created and when those descendant colonies are created.
There is a very interesting series by John C. Wright called _The Eschaton Sequence_ that explores this idea of stability over long time scales this in great detail (builds up through K7 civilizations over the course of the work)
Why does everyone assume alien races would want to spread out and colonize the universe? Perhaps we should consider the possibility that the insatiable desire to constantly expand like a virus is coupled with the tendency for civilizations to destroy themselves through warfare. Maybe civilizations with advanced technology also have advanced philosophy and are content to merely exist and be content? Why do we take it as a given that aliens would be anything like us, with the same desires and tendencies we have? Its fine to consider that as a possibility, but there are many unknowns we should acknowledge.
> Why does everyone assume alien races would want to spread out and colonize the universe?
...because organisms (and presumably cultures) without that characteristic wouldn't be as numerous as otherwise identical organisms which do have that drive, in a given environment.
Maybe we don't see them because they aren't as numerous, because they aren't interested in spreading out. Maybe the "drive" to spread out and colonize the universe or the cultures that would encourage that frame of thought are linked to a propensity to wage war or other some other counterproductive behavior that results in extinction before achieving the ability to colonize the stars.
>What would our telescopes see? It seems like we would most likely see exactly what we see today.
We'd see more red than we do - more heat and less light. Civilization produces heat. Advanced civilizations would presumably convert starlight to energy and produce waste heat.
Who's to say that the amount of red we're seeing now isn't exactly what you're describing? Maybe if we lived in a barren galaxy, we'd see a lot more _blue_, as stars shone unencumbered by matrioshka brains.
Ah ok. That makes sense. In that world, they can even use miniature black holes once they can stabilise and capture them in a field, to generate energy.
Why would they send themselves? Even we send robots, not humans, out to the distant edges of our solar system.
Why send the robot or alien at all if you can instead send the design/machine to make the alien. Perhaps they need send nothing more than RNA/DNA on an incoming space rock....
One issue with that is based on current physics, a deep space ship that isn't some millenia generation ship but accelerates to a decent percentage of c will expel a fuckton of energy in some type of fusion/fission/antimatter reaction, which tends toward being very, very visible. The first sign of a torchship-capable civilization wouldn't be random radio emissions, but would instead be some star system suddenly gaining another star that ignores orbital physics and instead ends up leaving said system at some absurd speed, probably with a bowshock measured in AUs from all the interstellar dust going nuclear as it collides with said ship.
I think it's time we stop looking for life near other stars and start saving our own. This planet is completely neglected. You want to live on Mars? That should be fun, without a magnetic core. Living underground, like rats.
If you want to know what frontier living feels like, take a week off and stay in one of the Inupiat villages on the edges of Alaska. You'll be climbing up walls in 3 days. And that is a luxurious vacation compared to frontier living on a barely habitable planet. Netflix? Nah, bro. They still have Blockbuster.
I have a somewhat nihilistic theory around the Fermi paradox. What if all intelligent life annihilates itself before reaching high enough technical proficiency to achieve widespread inter-planetary travel (or time travel). The idea is that intelligent life emerges from the process of evolution (natural selection) where the stronger survive. But that leaves you with people who have the tendency to kill each other and themselves off. As the technological ability to completely annihilate ourselves increases the probability that it will eventually happen goes up over time. As technological prowess increases and population increases, intelligent species eventually destroy themselves by using up all their resources or ruin the planet with climate destruction before achieving inter-planetary capability. Similar to how yeast will reproduce until they all kill themselves off in their own waste product (alcohol). It is possible that this is a universal axiom, hence intelligent life does not spread across the galaxy. I know this is a depressing thought but it's an idea that has haunted me once it occurred to me.
> Sounding a more ominous note are concepts such as the “great filter”—the idea that there is something that always limits a species, perhaps an inevitable failure to achieve that green revolution, leading to an implosive extinction of all potentially technological life.
The models attempt to encapsulate this issue through the variable of how long a civilization lasts. As easy as it is to imagine civilizations similar to us, it’s equally easy to imagine others where other variables prevent the intense egoism we evolved as a species. Or worlds where competition is less fierce perhaps. Etc..
Either way I find it fascinating that we could be living in what is essentially the rural area of the galaxy.
With a sample size of 1, there is no way to estimate the possibility of a species fundamentally unlike us becoming spacefaring.
We can count stars pretty well, but we can only barely estimate the probability of an earth-like planet existing around a star and forming cellular life.
This actually was kind of the nugget for me in this story: "At one extreme, it is easy to make the galaxy empty by simply shrinking the number of usable planets and having civilizations last for only, say, 100,000 years or so."
i.e. 10x longer than we have had even rudimentary technological civilization on our own planet. Sample size of 1, etc. but this to me seems the simple explanation of the "paradox". Space is big, and 100k years is a long period of time to not make a mistake.
They theory already is shown on Earth. Look how long it take humans to get to where we are, compared to how long it would have taken if a God had carefully guided us away from castrophes like the meteors, plagues, famines, and wars.
I think if you look at patterns in nature this has to be possible. Surely there are some remote ant colonies that don’t have interaction with anything outside the natural resources that sustain them.
My theory is that any advanced civilisation reaches a point at which a vast amount of destructive power becomes accessible to individuals. At this point it becomes only matter of time until that civilisation is destroyed.
The analogy I use is to imagine that every adult human on Earth woke up tomorrow morning with a button on their wrist that could destroy the Earth. How long do you think we would last?
We haven't reached a stage where an individual can create a nuclear bomb, a new kind of super-virus or some other doomsday weapon but I imagine its not an implausible scenario in the future. I think this is kind of a wall that all advanced civilisation may hit at some point.
If that happened you would probably see (wealthy) people migrating to underground bunkers to protect themselves and interact using VR. That could be one of the explanations why they don't go out to create colonies and make enough noise for us to detect them.
This is an interesting theory I have considered as well, however there is a reason to disbelieve it. It assumes at its core the diffusion of some form of highly destructive technology, and that the technology will be unleashed in an irreversible way before it can be recognized and “put back in the box”, or it can’t be “put back in the box”.
These assumptions individually seem strong but together they get quite weak. For example, diffusion of civilization over several planets before this technology is diffused provides a potential firewall. (For example, once the technology is recognized, an orderly exodus is made which forcibly leaves behind any trace of it.) Alternatively, the diffusion itself may not occur as well, similar to the current life-ending technologies we have now that can only be created by state actors.
It is a legitimate prospect — but hinges upon several aspects hung together to get to a point where it’s an inductive invariant explaining fermi.
Do note that it is orders of magnitude simpler to reach the technological level necessary to create the means of causing the collapse of civilization than to create the means to colonize other worlds. There are places on our own planet far more hospitable than any other world in our system that we haven't yet colonized, yet we are potentially a few political incidents away from nuclear annihilation.
It’s not hard to imagine in the near future that having a PhD in biology and access to a moderately equipped lab would grant a person the ability to create super plagues capable of killing most humans.
Couple that with the wide spread nihilism that wants to destroy the world because they can’t stand the injustice of life, and it’s a pretty good bet our time as a species is limited here.
If I were king for a day I’d do everything I could to get the message out that things are getting better, injustice is shrinking every year, and there is hope.
Nihilism has nothing to do with people who "can't stand the injustice of life", nor does it imply wanting to destroy the world. Please inform yourself.
A way out would be to quickly move our brain to machines and build fully autonomous and self sustaining asteroid sized ships (could be built in situ). To function as backups and spreader for our civilization
> It’s not hard to imagine in the near future that having a PhD in biology and access to a moderately equipped lab would grant a person the ability to create super plagues capable of killing most humans.
this is a good theory but you don't even have to look at it as, "each being has the will to destroy everyone". way more likely that it's a natural byproduct of existence that can't be adequately anticipated such that the species can do something about it. We're already on the edge of waiting for the bacteria that can't be killed, the climate disaster that destroys our food supply, etc. (you might say climate disaster is adequately anticipated, but while science is anticipating it, the whole of the species is unfortunately not).
Indeed, if this theory is correct what we should expect to see are individual, small expedition-like visitations, which aligns roughly with the limited bits of credible ufo-related data.
I wouldn’t say it is ignored, more that it isn’t particularly useful. Shaky YouTube videos don’t allow for much in the way of study. Even more convincing sources, such as that video released last year of the Tic Tac UFO, were interesting, but not all that useful.
I agree. To talk about the possibility is to commit scientific suicide. Even cautiously talking about the topic immediately outs you to others as a crackpot. I think it's undeserved. Especially when we are now seeing just how many habitable world's are out there. It seems plausible that we have been visited by curious extra terrestrial civilisations. The bizare patents coming out of the US navy suggest to me that no one knows where these things are coming from, if they are real.
It seems to me that the millions of events that happened in order to get to where we are now (alive on a rocky, water and oxygen-filled planet, in the Goldilocks zone of a healthy star) were sequential in nature and they took a finite amount of time to occur.
Assuming that there was A Beginning, where everything started at the same time, wouldn’t the steps to get to where we are in this process take about the same time for everyone else? Meaning that if there are other civilizations out there, that they’d more or less be as advanced as we are? Which is pretty sophisticated in certain areas at home, but not yet super capable in the long-distance human space travel department.
Not a scientist, just thinking out loud the thought I had reading the article.
Perhaps, but even tiny variances could cause shifts in the timeline of thousands or millions of years, which would be a blink compared to the age of the universe. Look how far we’ve come in the last 200 years. Imagine a civilization that is only 10,000 years ahead of us.
50000 years ago we were throwing chipped rocks at hairy elephants. Technology moves fast on galactic time scales. Expecting two alien species to have roughly the same tech would be like two randomly fired bullets to collide mid air.
Does a lion born in a zoo understand it's being held captive by (in comparison) super intelligent humans? When it's tranquilized, does it know this isn't a normal thing for a lion? When the caretaker throws food out or pets it, does the lion have the capacity to think about it in any other way than what it means right now for the lion - food, feels nice, etc?
If there's a correspondingly more intelligent alien species hanging out on our planet with us, would / could we even hope to know?
Edit: Ok. This is a common argument (well apart from
the "living on earth with us" bit which requires some Doctor Who levels of mind-wiping so let's discount that.
Lions see humans in the zoo, and they see the walls of theie prison. Lions definitely have had psychological problems in the worst run zoos so it is fair to say they are affected and aware.
Are they aware of the concept of zoo? Equally unlikely. And the next question is how much more intelligent is a human to a lion. the answer is not comforting to us as a species.
I'm not sure where the corresponding boundary would be exactly, since we do seem to be on the verge of exploring other planets, but you could say that we also understand where it is we're allowed to roam - the surface of Earth. And we aren't free of psychological problems.
But Lions don't appear to have any abstraction ability, or reflective thought. By that I mean you as a human can imagine yourself thinking about some hypothetical situation, as well as consider what kind of evidence would support a given hypothesis.
I think this might have actually happened (apocryphal?), but just imagine if you took humans from another country and put them in a zoo. They would surely figure it out, based on the evidence at hand.
Just like how a lion or a chimpanzee wouldn't make a convincing zoo for another lion or chimp, a human could figure out they're in a zoo made by another human.
But when you make a zoo for an animal that isn't on your level, you can figure out what's needed to satisfy it (even if it's really crappy compared to their normal environment).
So if something smarter than us by an order of magnitude or more made a zoo for us, it would be a much more elaborate and convincing zoo, and I'm not sure we'd figure it out.
If we are talking super-advanced, it wouldn't even need to be a physical zoo. Just mess with enough of our brains enough to make us not want to do certain things and we'll stay on this rock forever.
How exactly do we know they dont have reflective thought? Or at least any less reflective thought than your average human. Not really sure how to test that. I know there is the mirror test but what if there are different types of reflective thought and they just missed the boat on that by a little but have other kinds of thoughts?
Lions are also unaware of radio waves. We could be unaware of self-organizing ripples at the scale of subatomic particles. That's a life form that could efficiently colonize the universe hitching rides on rocks.
I would be especially careful of arguments that end up like "it's a great opportunity for humankind as no-one else is there to compete for the next million years"
It might be true. But the most likely thing we will find on the nearest habitable planet is a legal writ and summons.
I personally subscribe to the school of thought that interstellar travel is impossible, except through some form of suspended animation or generation ships (which both have its own problems). So no warp/hyperdrives, no wormholes, no shortcuts to travel between the stars. This article dismisses that notion before it even begins, but this is the only theory that fits the currently observed laws of the universe.
It's not individual lifespans that are the issue, it's the lifespan of your equipment. If your rocket breaks down in the interstellar void, you have no resources with which to fix it.
And then you need to be able to bootstrap the entire industrial base to build a new rocket at your destination without any help whatsoever aside from what you brought with you. Given the history of interoceanic colonization efforts on Earth, this suggests that the difficulty ranges from "insane" to "impossible."
I think thats stil managable, even simply by redundancy and sending fleets of ships. Also 3D printing of replacement parts seems pretty promissing and is already being looked into (there is a basic 3D printer or the ISS).
the article refers to travel not just by the species itself but by machinery that is not limited by lifespan, which in theory would also be observable. We have probes that have left the solar system through this means. not to mention just the simple example of radio waves.
The lifespan (either longer human, or mechanical) of individual travellers does not affect the speed of colonisation, so any communication would be quite limited. Which means that there be will be no interstellar "empires" or even cultures -- and if any habitable worlds are as rare as it seems to be the case for us, I'm not very optimistic about encountering any alien species any time soon.
The theory of this article is that we are not just in a gulf of space but also a gulf of time. We are after all on the relative outskirts of our galaxy, vastly isolated from other civilizations. Perhaps one day we'll be the ones knocking on our neighbor's door to say hello!
It presumes that technology will advance to the degree that we overcome the speed of light. Not directly, but that's where it has to wind up.
Because no matter how you slice it, it's still four years to Alpha Centauri at the fastest possible speed we know. That means it will be at a minimum 8 years before we know if anything was successful.
And yes, for the travelers, they experience time dilation, but we here on Earth would not. That time does matter. Even with self-replicating Von Neumann probes, they still have to send that information back. That's still going to take time.
How many resources can you dedicate to a bet that's going to take at least a decade to show a return? How many of those bets can you make before you've depleted your resources to the degree that you simply cannot do it anymore?
I think we may find ourselves up against the uncomfortable truth that our cosmic range is rather limited.
IIRC Fermi paradox does not expect FTL - a locust style colonization effort should be able to settle the whole milky way quite quickly (couple hundred thousand years) even with not very fas sub light travel.
Like I said, not directly, it doesn't, but once you start digging down, you're going to need that.
A couple hundred thousand years is quick on a cosmic scale, but we, as a species, have never undertaken any project on that scale ever. No species has that we have evidence of.
Any sublight travel is a one way trip with almost no hope of ever knowing it was a success by the people back home. No one funds that. And I don't blame them. There is no return in any fashion for the people who remain. And little to no return for anyone who starts the journey. The only thing you can possibly satisfy is some minor curiosity.
Travel to Proxima Centauri at the current highest speed we've sent probes into space would take over 80,000 years. If you double that speed. It will still take over 40,000 years.
So, cosmically, the time scale is short. And compared to light, the speed needed is slow.
But we're not light, are we? We don't exist on cosmic scales. I'm not concerned with the theoretical limits of physics. I'm more concerned with the practical limits of us.
Don't be; 'we' won't be doing it. These are evolutionary/revolutionary timescales; how many millenia away do you think general artificial intelligence is?
First, I think what we're searching for isn't intelligence so much as consciousness. So I'm going to treat general AI and consciousness as pretty much the same thing.
Considering we don't exactly know what consciousness is or what it means to "be intelligent", I have absolutely no clue how long it will take. But unless there is something I'm unaware of, I do think that we're approaching the problem from a wrong direction.
Think about it like this, we know that intelligence/consciousness is an emergent property of a lot of life on this planet. Including some life that we previously didn't consider aware in the traditional sense. Plant life may have some sort of intelligence/awareness.
When an artificial intelligence can express a genuine desire to avoid termination, we'll know we've gotten it.
Then again, do we even express genuine desires? Or are we simply inefficient meat computers responding in predictable ways to external stimuli?
So the question is whether or not general AI is even possible for us to make.
And then the assumption is that this general AI will be able to plan on the cosmic scale. But why? First, what's the life span for most electronics at this point? That factors into desire. What happens beyond our death is only of academic concern to us. To assume it won't factor into their decision making process is just speculation.
And if you presume we'd have programmed this general AI with the desire, well, it's not really a general AI, is it? We've robbed it of a decision. We've taken an entire forest of decision trees from it. It can't not choose to colonize the stars.
Then you're also making the assumption that general AI won't come to the conclusion that colonizing the stars is an inefficient use of resources. General AI doesn't really change the problems with the Fermi paradox, it only seems to add new problems.
>First, I think what we're searching for isn't intelligence so much as consciousness. So I'm going to treat general AI and consciousness as pretty much the same thing.
That's not how I think about it at all. I think you're underestimating how alien AI could be to us, in general. I.e., I think you're anthropomorphising it unnecessarily.
There's an idea called the orthogonality thesis, which says:
The intelligence of an arbitrary agent can vary independently of its goals.
Here, I'm using intelligence to mean just the ability of an agent to generate/evaluate/execute plans to further its goals. A modern chess AI on modern hardware is more intelligent than one from the 1980s.
In principle, you could have any arbitrary utility function attached to any level of intelligence.
This idea was brought up because often, when people heard about the paperclip maximiser (an agent that tries to maximize the number of paperclips- and thus wants to take apart everything in its lightcone and turn it into paperclips), they said:
"But why would something so clever do something so stupid and pointless? A superintelligence would surely realize it was being stupid and decide to do something smarter."
But there's no reason to think this! When you take away the agent's goal of maximising paperclips, there's no perfect platonic ghost of consciousness left! The paperclip maximiser, as defined is just an algorithm that predicts the future, looking for actions that maximise paperclips, and executes them.
Given unbounded compute power, it can just look through arbitrarily many counterfactual simulations of the future given different plans, pick the plan that maximises the number of paperclip-like structures in the universe, and execute it.
The rest is implementation details, given we don't have unbounded computing power, but the point is such a system doesn't need to be conscious to be powerful.
If you have an AI without a utility function, you don't have an AI. 'General intelligence' just means the AI's computing/reasoning/versatility power, in a vague sense. It has nothing to do with whatever particular utility function an agent might be trying to maximize.
The paperclip machine doesn't 'want' to colonize the stars; it's just a system that will do that if it can, because tautologically, it's a system that tries to turn as much as it can into paperclips.
I don't really think there is a Fermi 'paradox'. We don't have solid priors on how often agents arise in the universe. The fact there aren't any visible aliens should either just lower our estimates of how likely life is, or maybe there's some sort of anthropic principle argument to be made here where we probably wouldn't observe a universe where aliens come to visit, because in nearly all possible universes where intelligent life survives and goes from star to star it just eats all the stars very quickly on astronomical timescales or something, such that the chances of intelligent agents like us arising while there's visible evidence of other agents is incredibly slim.
Like I said, we don't even know what consciousness is.
To say there is a platonic consciousness is kind of saying you know what that looks like. And to say that you could grant something an intelligence capable of solving the problem of colonizing the stars while also denying it the ability to choose its own goals is an assumption I'm not willing to grant.
In other words, there is "a reason to think this!" We are that reason. Other life on this planet is reason to think this.
I am intrigued by the simulation theory. That we as a species has reached a certain level of advancement to simulate a reality and experience it; or we may just be npcs or temporary programs for another intelligent race in this simulation.
We could also be a zoo/prison planet far into enemy territory. Currently being experimented and observed. Hybridization in order to infiltrate our actual civilization that’s located elsewhere.
Fascinating theory, but we aren't Pitcairn Island.
> Why, then, have we found no irrefutable evidence of aliens visiting Earth?
We have evidence, it just gets "refuted" for psychological reasons. The Fermi Paradox is a Rorschach test, and has nothing to do with reality.
In reality, humans in every culture have recorded incidents of communications with non-human intelligences.[0]
In reality, the Brazilian Military has gotten much less coy about UFO phenomenon in recent years and has started declassifying documents. Their overall conclusion is that, whatever they are, UFOs are real, pose no national security threat, and should be researched and discussed by society at large, with some urgency.
Here's a fascinating lecture by a Brazilian UFO researcher about the overall situation in Brazil and he describes three encounters that are known to have government involvement (so the researchers know what to ask about, in these cases.)
> In 1977, numerous UFOs were seen in the Brazilian city of Colares, Pará. The UFOs fired light beams at people, causing injuries and sucking blood from 400 witnesses. After a rise in local concern, the mayor of the city requested help from the Air Force. Operation Saucer started, during which numerous photos were taken and testimonies collected. Operation Saucer is just one of the compelling cases which A. J. Gevaerd, editor of Brazilian UFO magazine, talked about in his latest lecture in Copenhagen, paving the way for complete Disclosure in his country. Kudos to Exopolitics Denmark for setting up their excellent annual conference at the Danish National Museum on September 26 in Copenhagen!
The first case involves thousands of people, living on an island in the Amazon, who were attacked by UFOs over a period of several years (1975-1977 IIRC). Flying cans with visible pilots were shooting people with bending "light" beams and sucking up their blood. It got so bad that thousands of people evacuated and the Brazilian Army sent in a unit to find out what was going on and try to make contact. I won't spoil the rest of the story here.
To me, the strangest thing I can see is the question: Why would people (aliens or humans) who have evidently advanced technology go around attacking poor villagers to suck their blood!? WTF?
[0] (I myself once attended a event at an airport hotel at which some purple telepathic space dolphins were guest lecturers. FWIW, their basic TL;DR: was "Be nice to each other." Aliens were attending underground raves in Seattle in the 90's.)
What’s the point of settling on planets if you can sustainably develop anywhere in space, which I think is within the reach of any typical space-faring civilization?
The problem with these types of arguments is they are assumptions built on top of other assumptions.
We don’t know how to colonize other star systems, so we don’t really know the factors at play. How easy is it to travel to another planet and start a colony? We don’t know. How likely is it that that colony will colonize other planets? We don’t know. We are taking numbers we guessed and multiplying with other numbers we guessed to get to an answer. If any of them are much off the answer doesn’t make sense?
What if the amount of resources to successfully travel to and colonize a planet in another solar system is so high that the vast majority of attempts fail and only a few attempts can be made? We can have n (pick some random large number) intelligent civilizations in our galaxy and not know a thing about them.
My thoughts exactly. I've always found it funny how people imply there's some major issue with cosmology because the Drake equation shows there should be intelligent life all over. Even though some of the terms in that equation are very not known and it would only take a few being an order of magnitude or two smaller than expected to result in a paucity of intelligent life rather than an abundance.
Right. The Drake equation was never supposed to "show" anything. I think the original intent was to lay out the factors at play and stimulate conversation, not to provide a probability. I think over time, the imagination of the public have taken over though and put more confidence behind things than we should.
One thing I fail to see mentioned here and in such articles is the complexity of colonization. We are falling in the trap of "idea == profit". A lot needs to be done, and can go wrong, between both.
Some examples I am thinking of, and I am certain people will have more... All are compounded by the LY distances between colonies and whatever home is:
- Terraforming - It would be the exception that new planets are 100% hospitable to a specific species. How long to properly terraform, and then how long before the can get to a point where they can launch a new sub-colony? Need proper population, technology and resources.
- Culture drift - how long can the colony and home share the same culture, with same values and objectives?
- Political drift - Imagine you are part of a colony, with "home" some 4 LY away. How long before you will want to have full autonomy, specially given the distance?
- Cultural and political factions - Is it possible that individuals in the colony have different objectives, resulting with political infighting or open war? What would then be the impact on the colony?
- Protection - Depending on technological advancement, how can a colony protect itself from external rogue elements (big warship gone rogue, pirating the colonies for resources?)
For sure, many of these things depend on the type of species colonizing its region, how much sentience and free will they have. I also assume they haven't solved FTL travel!
270 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] threadGranted Cixin Liu stretches physics into all sorts of implausible places, but it does make a strong argument for the theory.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/48838110-three-body-prob...
The trilogy is very enjoyable!
But, if you stop and think about it, in the real universe it has two gaping problems:
First, The Dark Forest theory depends on the capability and willingness to develop world destroying devices.
Second, it depends on the likelihood that the species you detect has not yet spread to other systems. If it has, congratulations, you have started a shooting war with an enemy whose threat level you have no gauge of. Some with an inclination of game theory might want to figure this out through better, though.
Any civilization capable of traveling to another solar system has this capability: just take one of their ships designed to accelerate to significant fractions of the speed of light and decelerate at the other end of the journey, set a course, and simply don't decelerate.
> Second, it depends on the likelihood that the species you detect has not yet spread to other systems. If it has, congratulations, you have started a shooting war with an enemy whose threat level you have no gauge of. Some with an inclination of game theory might want to figure this out through better, though.
There's a good chance the above described weapon would be nearly undetectable and untraceable. For at least the latter half of its journey, it's just a chunk of mass traveling through space, emitting no signals. It would also be only a small factor difference in capability (0-1 more accelerations and decelerations than an actual interstellar transit) to send it from a different part of the galaxy.
Another series is Greg Bear’s Forge of God
The civilizations that are able to forge alliances will tend to out-compete lone wolves.
Liu assumes that it is somehow a lot easier to wipe out a civilization than communicate with it, and that for some reason your civilization has to decide to wipe out another civilization without communicating with it.
strategically speaking and stunning hostile unknowns a stable civilization controls a territory matching reasonable response time from the ready armies at their combat speed and necessarily a requirement for alliances to form is for these zones to overlap
but if they are at such distance it negates one of the prerequisite for the dark forest theory, that civs are sparse enough for the chance of facing hostiles alone is on par with encountering non hostile civs
You're not going to form any sort of "alliance" over a distance of light-years, much less consider the fleets of hostile civilizations to be a threat by their proximity the way England once considered Spanish fleets a threat. There's no "reasonable response time" when allies will take years to hear your distress call, and more years to arrive.
This may be true, though. We struggle to effectively communicate with creatures on our own planet available in real-time, like dolphins and elephants, who appear to think and have language of sorts.
Launching some relativistic sand at another planet may well be a lot easier.
To a spacefaring civilization a million years might be the human equivalent of a decade.
The sad truth is that intelligent humans (enough to think and act on thoughts of space travel) have barely existed on the cosmic timeline, and likely won’t live long enough to know the answer to whether or not we’re alone. Not because of some romanticized fermi gate paradoxical reasoning, but simply because we ran out of time.
Human history is full of examples of societies which treated their kin with kindness, but others with cruelty.
One supplier of lab mice in Maine provides ~3 million mice per year...
Yearly production (and slaughter) of chickens is something like 60+ billion. Not sure if sentient, but perhaps they deserve it as descendants of the dinosaurs that terrorized human ancestors...
What would our telescopes see? It seems like we would most likely see exactly what we see today.
The probability that one of those ships happened to fly anywhere close to our solar system, while we were looking, is still vanishingly small. Omnidirectional radio transmissions spread so quickly that they fall below the noise floor almost instantly over interstellar distances.
Space is really really really really big. We can see stars. We can just barely see some planets in a few very specific configurations. We can sometimes make coarse estimates of the chemical composition of those planets. And that's about it. We don't really know how to detect life on extrasolar planets. The ones we've already found could be teeming with life and we wouldn't know it.
“A telescope about 51,075 ft (15,568 m) in diameter would be required to resolve the Upper stage from Earth. A smaller one could see him as an unresolved dot, about 98.2 ft (29.9 m) in diameter, in ideal conditions”
So I recon that reinforces the hypothesis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deimos_(moon)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude
Edit: corrected
To image something like the roadster on a Planet orbiting Vega (~26 LY away, furthest star anyone on Earth could visit and then return from in a lifetime) you're looking at lenses greater than the orbit of Pluto, ish.
Optics/Physics is a bitch here. To really see/prove there are aliens running about, they have to screaming at the top of their lungs for a very very long time, hoping against hope that anyone will hear. It's just really really hard to build equipment that can passively listen for accidental broadcasts and spy on alien cars. At least under our current understanding of physics.
[0] http://hosting.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses/astro201/...
It is not necessarily true that more time is spent aboard a ship than light would spend taking the same path, as measured by an external observer.
If you had a ship capable of accelerating at 1g indefinitely, then as measured by the crew, they could cross the galaxy in only 24 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_using_constant_ac...
To an observer who is self-propelled (and has enough energy), the speed of light (as seen by others) is no limit. It's not like you can fire your thrusters and NOT gain momentum and speed; or that, as you accelerate, the stars start passing by at the speed of light, and suddenly your ship jerks, ceasing to accelerate, because you hit an invisible velocity brick wall.
A much larger range of the parameter-space could produce either thousands+ of technological species (which we have pretty good evidence is not the case) or less than one on average pretty galaxy.
So we have the options:
Lots of species (contradicted by the evidence)
A handful of species (inherently unlikely)
Very few species (current best bet)
We do not know how to detect life outside of our solar system. The only way our measurements would change is if one of them literally landed on top of us.
And if there are all these technological species, we would expect some of them to be much more advanced than we are. Why haven't some of them noticed us?
You can come up with possible answers to these questions, it's just that those answers look less likely than, "those species aren't actually out there."
So, question: how strong does an undirected, random signal need to be to be reasonably detected at 10 light years away?
But a simpler explanation that has many more paths to being true is "there's nothing out there."
To be clear, I don't think the evidence suggests near-certainty here. I wouldn't say that there's a 99% chance that we're alone in the galaxy. But it's also not a wide open field. There is some evidence, and so far that evidence suggests that we're likely alone.
Alien life forms wouldn't need to use technology to make themselves harder to detect. It's extremely difficult by default.
They would need to use technology to deliberately spread a message in a way that is at all likely to be detectable, and even then would still have to get quite lucky.
We already know neutrinos can travel through most mass, so modulating those would let you transmit through the Earth and Sun with lower latency and without a repeater constellation routing around the object.
Whatever aliens might be using to transmit information is likely more advanced than we're able to detect.
Maybe they have?
We don't "contact" every pack of deer that we notice.
It is not that humans are technologically primitive (which we are), it might be we are too intellectually/capacity primitive to be seen as "contact" worthy.
You can't see a laser transmission off-axis if there aren't any stray photons reaching your detector - that's just physics.
You can't detect a radio signal below the noise floor without some a priori knowledge about the statistics of the signal.
These aren't justifications, these are simply facts about the current limits of our ability to detect far-away signals. These limits suggest that millions of far-away worlds could be extremely chatty between themselves, but unless they decided to point a transmitter at us, we would be none the wiser.
You shouldn't use a measurement that looks identical for case A and case B to decide which one is more likely.
Imagine if we had thousands of microsats in orbit around the various planets that we could triangulate data amongst? We need to be more aware of our solar system before we can even make reasoned arguments about life within it alone.
That's an excellent point, for all we know we have intelligent, non-spacefaring life right in our solar system. It's unlikely, but there's still plenty of oceans, gas giant atmospheres and lava tubes that we haven't looked at yet.
We would not observe anything different unless one of them actually flew to our solar system and tried to contact us. That's how bad we are at detecting distant life.
And while intelligent life may exist on a planet for millions of years, their window of actually emitting something into the void in a manner we can detect with our tech today [0] will probably be a lot shorter than that.
This gives us a relatively tiny and limited visibility window into the history of life out there. Unless we manage to sync our window perfectly with theirs we'll never know they existed.
[0] https://www.xkcd.com/638/
[1] Particularly if your operation is covert, discrete, observational, non-disruptive: you'd want to avoid signaling your presence in all directions, while wasting 99.99% of that energy away from your intended receiver. It's just military efficiency, a photon-VPN so to speak, that you'd need to "physically MitM" to hack.
Now, exchange that for a black-ish ship a few hundred meters sized, quietly coming from Vega to visit say, Saturn. Nobody would probably notice it coming and going, despite Saturn being one of the most popular targets of the entire sky.
So, some alien unmanned probe the likes of Voyager in large orbit around the Sun? Yeah, no chance in hell we'd detect that by random chance, we'd have to seriously upgrade our space infrastructure to even pretend 'monitoring' our close vicinity, let alone post-Jovian space. And we have virtually no knowledge of about half the distance between interstellar medium and the Sun, that's how limited we are to even modeling the closest star systems.
Edit: apparently double-post with aruggirello; I agree with him.
Oh, and that thing is mostly between the orbits of Mars and earth - much smaller search space than "the entire solar system"
[1] https://www.whereisroadster.com/
Perhaps you mean in a solar orbit near the Earth?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Nine
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/planet-nine-may-actu...
How is that supposed to work?
Also, we were able to land men on the moon 50 years ago, and now that knowledge is basically gone, and the tapes lost, and people are starting to believe the Earth is flat and that the moon landing never even happened.
Meanwhile, we can still read tax records from ancient Sumeria because they were carved into clay.
Complex systems are always more fragile than simple ones. It seems to me like we've been standing on a house of cards for the last century.
Your scenario requires a uniformity of outcome across all the parts of that civilization, spread across multiple stars, and spread across all future time. They all have to go down and stay down.
So, if a stable multistellar society is not building colony ships, it's not because it can't, but because it has chosen not to. How does that uniformity of choice get enforced across time and space?
They'd more or less evolve completely independently and it's conceivable that having these limitations will mean they never reach the same potential as the original humans did on Earth.
Usually the comparison with colonists of the past pops up. But they had the distinct advantage of being perfectly adapted to the planet and many civilizations still perished. Seeding another planet with humans raises a lot the bar for successfully developing a thriving civilization capable of reaching the levels required to further spawn successful colonies.
And a philosophical thought: would they even still be humans after (tens of) millennia away from the home of humanity, in vastly different conditions from the ones that evolved us? Would they be "our" thousands of colonies?
What you have are individual civilizations which may or may not, as you mention, decide to invest the time and resources into interstellar travel. But that investment isn't guaranteed. We've had the technology to send out interstellar probes for decades, yet we haven't committed to sending them out by the hundreds or thousands. We could have colonized Mars or the Moon by now, built Orion starships, but we haven't. Technology doesn't govern the advance of space travel, politics does.
>How does that uniformity of choice get enforced across time and space?
I think it's just a matter of probability. I don't believe technological development, much less to the degree of having a space program, are an inevitable result of intelligence or the presence of civilization. It's easier not to have a space program. It's easier, if you have a space program, to only explore your own solar system. Any number of issues, such as not being near enough to a colonizable star, not having sufficient energy or resources, natural disaster, giant ants, robot uprising, superflu, etc. could keep a civilization from starting, much less maintaining, a project of the necessary magnitude for the necessary amount of time.
And then you have to survive the trip, and actually succeed at colonizing another planet.
I think it's entirely within the bounds of reason for every civilization which has attempted interstellar travel to have failed up to this point.
However, the economic cost of making an interstellar colonisation ship is so vast, that from where we are it seems reasonable to assume that anyone who does it has fully automated manufacturing and resource gathering – or, to put it another way, they are post-scarcity. If you’re post-scarcity, then you’re no longer fragile, because you can have a complete backup of everything you need, including the skills needed to rebuild.
Of course, there’s lots of ways for things to go wrong, and if I were to imagine badly written control software that means the fully automated manufacturing kills everyone, I’d be accused of being too derivative rather than implausible…
Just look at what we have achieved in Earth vs. what we have achieved on the moon, or anyone's plans for a Mars colony. Mankind may set for on Mars eventually, but i don't think we'll ever do something like set off fireworks there.
Any colony that moves past the immediate survival stage is a success. That does not mean they have millions of years of fossil fuel stored to start further exploration.
I assume that it will require population control, because we will not be able to find enough habitable planets to keep up with the growth we have today. Basically a choice of "immortality" or procreation. This will also set a limit to how many colonies that are practical to create.
Also some may not accept the risks of travelling to other solar systems. Why risk dying "young" when you can expect to live for thousands of years?
If all these long living people dont have to much new children (and might not be able to ? eq. if fully digitized or with body fully replaced with mechanical parts), it might be even easier.
Why would we stop at a hundred of colonies? A couple of observations:
- in rich countries, the trend is that the birth rate is declining, the population gets "older". There seems to be a link between wealth and birth rate. Even if space conquest gives us a lot of resources, if that trend persists, the lack of people will be the limiting factor.
- there are only really two reasons to go out: curiosity and making sure that a stellar-scale catastrophic event doesn't wipe out our civilization. A bunch of colonies "far enough" from Sol achieves this. And probably after visiting a dozen of systems, the next one will look like one of the previously visited.
You could argue that exploration, migrations, colonization are but the emergent/complex behaviors described by more fundamental principles in psychology, sociology, biology. Conway's game of life, in a way. History being a mere factual, chronological account — a log.
You are thereby operating at a high-level, manipulating complex umbrella objects like "great migrations", "local population pressure", each of whose words (composite concepts) map to lower-level datapoints — e.g. like some eternal tension (psy., soc., hist., bio...) between a desire to look inwards (for security? familiarity? survival, support?) and a drive to seek outwards (for growth? curiosity? lack, want, need?)
It’s very possible to reach a wall where zero teraformable planets are within reach of your ships. For large civilizations that’s unlikely to totally block expansion, but it might make the path very convoluted thus increasing total time by a rather extreme factor.
The transport layer is the easy part. Content integrity is a much harder problem.
All of your probes and colony ships have to reproduce the source culture - or some viable subservient spin-off - with 100% accuracy.
This explicitly means 100% reproductive success of all features, especially the politics and economics, with no errors.
For a successful colony, stability and conformity have to be maintained for long periods - centuries at a minimum, perhaps even millions of years.
And of course this assumes the source culture is stable in the first place.
Otherwise you're just seeding the galaxy with potential competitors, and/or setting up some kind of galactic Battle Royale.
I'm bemused by the suggestion the first option is actually possible. The second seems more likely, but might not be considered a success in the sense of creating a stable galaxy-spanning civ capable of common strategic goals.
The only thing that needs to be preserved is the desire to build more colonies. I'll grant even that's a stretch, but demanding 100% cultural fidelity is silly for discussing the Fermi paradox.
Further it seems much less likely the populace would be so willing to send aide to Britain during WWI if it weren’t for the cultural similarities. If instead Spain had colonized the US it seems very likely the country would have remained neutral as Spain did.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Imperios_Español_y...
It's not just the US either. India was a profitable colony at the time but might turn out to be a major detriment to Britain overall, both as a source of cheap skilled labor and as a powerful nation of their own. Who knows what would have happened without the British. A lot of the borders in the Middle East are drawn by Britain as part of their WWI mandates/colonies, and the problems from how those borders were drawn spill over into Britain (yes, it's not the only problem in the Middle East by a long shot, but it's one of them).
I still think overall Britain came out ahead (just look at Hong Kong for what cultural influence can do), but it's not hard to imagine how colonization might be seen as a net negative if a few times things turned out even slightly worse.
It could have gone another way, there’s a reason we’re talking about Britain instead of England and Scotland, but I would say it has worked out brilliantly.
That's hard. I'd say harder than solving the physical problems of interstellar travel. Once a generation has learned to live with the limited resources of a starship, living with the limited resources of a planet is going to be a very attractive option. What's their incentive to colonize more from there?
That is, if we are talking about something comparable to current humans. Immortal super AIs might don't care about idling in the void for a few million years, just for the opportunity to re-sync those gained experiences to their decentralized knowledge a few million years down the line. I really like the single omnipotent AI scenario, since being immortal and not depending on others changes quite drastically what strategies can be successful - it won't be anything like human kings who need to keep their subjects at bay and working for them to support their power and limited life. But we shouldn't restrict our imagination, if we are talking about possibilities and galactic time-spans.
The important part is, as mentioned by GP, the desire to expand, since this is a dominant strategy. In comparison, not every living being on earth has the drive to participate in evolution by e.g. creating offspring. Those usually just drop out of the "game" and likely won't matter in the long term, at worst making it a bit harder for the others initially till their disappearance. What matters are those who have persistent impact... e.g. by colonizing/making offspring.
If more technologically advanced aliens exist then our not sensing them is much more likely because they don't want to be sensed than some other consideration like them stopping to setup on some habitable planet. I'm horrified about war, and I'd hope they would be too, but it may be that aliens come to understand species or ecosystems in a more expansive way and may consider the process of ending war as a necessary one for the maturation of an ecosystem.
Or the great filter is true. We all end up killing ourselves because it's impossible to escape exponential technology growth and mismatched incentive problems, or something else like that.
Terrorism, as you mention, might be possible (but again remember, no stealth) and claim jumping (where you displace another group that got there roughly when you did). But even in densely packed stellar neighborhoods the average star is surrounded by a moat several light years across. Once the locals are developed enough to mount a serious defense, they're probably immovable.
More generally, the point I'm raising is symbolized in entirety by the Spartan faction's ideology in that narrative environment.
Dropping asteroids on habitable worlds and causing ice ages to clear out the population _might_ still be faster/cheaper than terraforming a semi-hostile world.
Further starship drive capable of reaching a significant fraction of the speed of light make one hell of a weapon. But you still need to deal with space based assets that can dodge your initial bombardment and at a minimum are armed with powerful engines. So sure you can destroy planetary populations etc, but now your still out gunned 1,000:1 locally and pissed off a civilization capable of doing the same thing to you. Net result MAD.
A large technical advantage may make up for this, but that means the winner has better tech is much harder to take over a second time. On top of this the only thing worth shipping between stars is information at the speed of light. Making conquest largely pointless without FTL.
It could be worthwhile to beam energy out to interstellar distances (also at the speed of light). This is probably needed for interstellar travel anyway.
The number one attribute that needs to be preserved is the disinclination to blow each other to smithereens. I suspect self-destruction (to a level where technological progress is setback millenia) is a common enough occurrence that would occur well-before FTL becomes a possibility.
I also suspect (despite decades of reading SF and my own wishes to the contrary), that the kinds of attributes that encourage exploration, expansion and risk-taking, are also somehow linked to aggression and violence - "might makes right".
Also, a neighbor idea of the scientific progression in thousand years from now on doesn’t account for an artificial biology progression, like the same humans in 1k years would do unimaginable things. Would they be still individual humans? Personally I don’t think it is more than juvenile civilization’s tunnel vision illusions.
Any empire/political system/civilization needs some means of holding it together. Traditionally this is done through armies. As our transport technology has gotten better, our ability to move armies around the world has increased and with it the ability to control large economic systems without them breaking apart. Nowadays we have a globe-spanning economy. However, time scales of interstellar travel are so big that cultural change is much faster than the method to build a colony. By the time that nuclear bomb ship has arrived at the other planet, we might have changed our mind threefold.
In fact, already if you send a generational spaceship to a star 100 ly away to reach its destination in a thousand years, by the time you receive message from their arrival, both their as our language will have evolved by 1100 years. So yeah you are right, cultural decay (or rather "change") is a big problem.
Currently our governments are run by humans with all the human failings. Instability, corruption, etc are components of the governments due to our human nature. You are right that it would be hard for human run governments to colonize the galaxy as due to the light speed limit, we can't achieve transport scales needed for a human-run civilization.
However, we won't need humans to run the governments. In the future we'll be able to engineer and build extremely intelligent AI systems with multiple layers of error checking to withstand decay for trillions of years. You think that sounds undoable? Check how many cells humans are made out of and how well they work together for decades.
The unsolvable political problem will just be turned into a solvable engineering problem.
Those AI systems would run key parts of the governments and economies themselves (entirely without needing human help) and enforce a set of basic rules like preventing nuclear weapons, bioweapons, torture, etc alongside ensuring they are the most powerful factor in those places, i.e. are able to fend off any kind of attack. Otherwise they won't interfere with human matters and let humans govern themselves with the human imperfections.
Basically, they'd provide the "galactic federation layer" and ensure peace through their programming. Some factors of their programming could be changed by the human population, but others, like preventing nuclear weapons, couldn't. So even if the humans wanted, they wouldn't be able to wage catastrophic war with the neighbour planet, or at least specific types of war (allowing trade war but not allowing nuclear war). Even if the risk for interplanetary war is just 0.1% per year, over millennia that's a large number and interplanetary war can have major consequences.
To the present reader, those AI systems probably seem weird and dystopic, but I think we are already evolving towards them. Already, many parts of the governments and economies of various countries are being automated. One day in the future the automation will have minimized human involvement enough so that you can think about von Neumann probes.
The first people to develop AI ran governments will probably be the dictatorships who want absolute control and micromanagement (single-operator government). But in general, the systems are more efficient than chaotic systems, and with increasing perfection of the technology, once a system is a dictatorship, it probably won't change back to a non-dictatorship without outside interference. It's important to eventually remove human control from them as otherwise over the millions of years, eventually someone will figure out how to flip the switch and create dictatorships. So it's kinda important to get the "right" set of rules into these computers.
Already building these computers is a huge project that would take a long time to get it right. But it's an easier task for humans ...
It is not necessarily true that more time is spent aboard a ship than light would spend taking the same path, as measured by an external observer.
If you had a ship capable of accelerating at 1g indefinitely, then as measured by the crew, they could cross the galaxy in only 24 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_using_constant_ac...
I like everything else you wrote.
Particle physics get matter to 99.9999% of c which causes crazy time dilation to the particles and nothing to the scientists. Further, constant 1g acceleration of a starship to high fractions of c is basically science fiction. Not even matter anti matter reactions can keep up those energy demands for very long.
This is why when you're calculating the actual value of time dilation, it considers what fraction of speed of light you're traveling. Because if you were the traveler, time dilates and length contracts EXACTLY enough to make light appear to travel at 1c (regardless of your own speed).
Time dilation is only 1/2 the story. The other half is distance measurements get distorted.
People in the spaceship see the same maximum velocity of objects they pass aka c. However, if a huge measuring tape with say light year tick marks passing them they are going to measure it’s speed at say .99 c and the time between tick marks is X. Alternatively, at .999c they would get a new time period Y. However the difference between X and Y is not simply .999/.99 but rather a more complex relativistic adjustment.
However, this is only important for people on the spaceship. For people staying home the it takes 3.5x the energy to hit .999c vs .99c yet it’s only shaving 1% off the observed travel time. Which is unlikely to be considered worth it by just about any civilization baring significant changes to the laws of physics.
Yes, that's why I mentioned length contraction. They're results of the same transformation I believe. So they're directly related. Same as mass and every other supposed "constant" in newtonian mechanics.
https://us.macmillan.com/series/theeschatonsequence/
...because organisms (and presumably cultures) without that characteristic wouldn't be as numerous as otherwise identical organisms which do have that drive, in a given environment.
We'd see more red than we do - more heat and less light. Civilization produces heat. Advanced civilizations would presumably convert starlight to energy and produce waste heat.
Or planetary surfaces.
Why send the robot or alien at all if you can instead send the design/machine to make the alien. Perhaps they need send nothing more than RNA/DNA on an incoming space rock....
If you want to know what frontier living feels like, take a week off and stay in one of the Inupiat villages on the edges of Alaska. You'll be climbing up walls in 3 days. And that is a luxurious vacation compared to frontier living on a barely habitable planet. Netflix? Nah, bro. They still have Blockbuster.
> Sounding a more ominous note are concepts such as the “great filter”—the idea that there is something that always limits a species, perhaps an inevitable failure to achieve that green revolution, leading to an implosive extinction of all potentially technological life.
Either way I find it fascinating that we could be living in what is essentially the rural area of the galaxy.
We can count stars pretty well, but we can only barely estimate the probability of an earth-like planet existing around a star and forming cellular life.
i.e. 10x longer than we have had even rudimentary technological civilization on our own planet. Sample size of 1, etc. but this to me seems the simple explanation of the "paradox". Space is big, and 100k years is a long period of time to not make a mistake.
The analogy I use is to imagine that every adult human on Earth woke up tomorrow morning with a button on their wrist that could destroy the Earth. How long do you think we would last?
We haven't reached a stage where an individual can create a nuclear bomb, a new kind of super-virus or some other doomsday weapon but I imagine its not an implausible scenario in the future. I think this is kind of a wall that all advanced civilisation may hit at some point.
These assumptions individually seem strong but together they get quite weak. For example, diffusion of civilization over several planets before this technology is diffused provides a potential firewall. (For example, once the technology is recognized, an orderly exodus is made which forcibly leaves behind any trace of it.) Alternatively, the diffusion itself may not occur as well, similar to the current life-ending technologies we have now that can only be created by state actors.
It is a legitimate prospect — but hinges upon several aspects hung together to get to a point where it’s an inductive invariant explaining fermi.
Couple that with the wide spread nihilism that wants to destroy the world because they can’t stand the injustice of life, and it’s a pretty good bet our time as a species is limited here.
If I were king for a day I’d do everything I could to get the message out that things are getting better, injustice is shrinking every year, and there is hope.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism
Pretty sure that's already the case.
The scary part is that there actually already is a web site that sells those...
no it doesnt. It seems increasingly implausible
Assuming that there was A Beginning, where everything started at the same time, wouldn’t the steps to get to where we are in this process take about the same time for everyone else? Meaning that if there are other civilizations out there, that they’d more or less be as advanced as we are? Which is pretty sophisticated in certain areas at home, but not yet super capable in the long-distance human space travel department.
Not a scientist, just thinking out loud the thought I had reading the article.
The terms of the Fermi paradox are are designed to cover things like this.
If there's a correspondingly more intelligent alien species hanging out on our planet with us, would / could we even hope to know?
Edit: Ok. This is a common argument (well apart from the "living on earth with us" bit which requires some Doctor Who levels of mind-wiping so let's discount that.
Lions see humans in the zoo, and they see the walls of theie prison. Lions definitely have had psychological problems in the worst run zoos so it is fair to say they are affected and aware.
Are they aware of the concept of zoo? Equally unlikely. And the next question is how much more intelligent is a human to a lion. the answer is not comforting to us as a species.
It also speaks to the limitations of our senses and the way we experience the world.
I think this might have actually happened (apocryphal?), but just imagine if you took humans from another country and put them in a zoo. They would surely figure it out, based on the evidence at hand.
Just like how a lion or a chimpanzee wouldn't make a convincing zoo for another lion or chimp, a human could figure out they're in a zoo made by another human.
But when you make a zoo for an animal that isn't on your level, you can figure out what's needed to satisfy it (even if it's really crappy compared to their normal environment).
So if something smarter than us by an order of magnitude or more made a zoo for us, it would be a much more elaborate and convincing zoo, and I'm not sure we'd figure it out.
It might be true. But the most likely thing we will find on the nearest habitable planet is a legal writ and summons.
And then you need to be able to bootstrap the entire industrial base to build a new rocket at your destination without any help whatsoever aside from what you brought with you. Given the history of interoceanic colonization efforts on Earth, this suggests that the difficulty ranges from "insane" to "impossible."
It presumes too much.
It presumes that technology will advance to the degree that we overcome the speed of light. Not directly, but that's where it has to wind up.
Because no matter how you slice it, it's still four years to Alpha Centauri at the fastest possible speed we know. That means it will be at a minimum 8 years before we know if anything was successful.
And yes, for the travelers, they experience time dilation, but we here on Earth would not. That time does matter. Even with self-replicating Von Neumann probes, they still have to send that information back. That's still going to take time.
How many resources can you dedicate to a bet that's going to take at least a decade to show a return? How many of those bets can you make before you've depleted your resources to the degree that you simply cannot do it anymore?
I think we may find ourselves up against the uncomfortable truth that our cosmic range is rather limited.
A couple hundred thousand years is quick on a cosmic scale, but we, as a species, have never undertaken any project on that scale ever. No species has that we have evidence of.
Any sublight travel is a one way trip with almost no hope of ever knowing it was a success by the people back home. No one funds that. And I don't blame them. There is no return in any fashion for the people who remain. And little to no return for anyone who starts the journey. The only thing you can possibly satisfy is some minor curiosity.
Travel to Proxima Centauri at the current highest speed we've sent probes into space would take over 80,000 years. If you double that speed. It will still take over 40,000 years.
So, cosmically, the time scale is short. And compared to light, the speed needed is slow.
But we're not light, are we? We don't exist on cosmic scales. I'm not concerned with the theoretical limits of physics. I'm more concerned with the practical limits of us.
Considering we don't exactly know what consciousness is or what it means to "be intelligent", I have absolutely no clue how long it will take. But unless there is something I'm unaware of, I do think that we're approaching the problem from a wrong direction.
Think about it like this, we know that intelligence/consciousness is an emergent property of a lot of life on this planet. Including some life that we previously didn't consider aware in the traditional sense. Plant life may have some sort of intelligence/awareness.
When an artificial intelligence can express a genuine desire to avoid termination, we'll know we've gotten it.
Then again, do we even express genuine desires? Or are we simply inefficient meat computers responding in predictable ways to external stimuli?
So the question is whether or not general AI is even possible for us to make.
And then the assumption is that this general AI will be able to plan on the cosmic scale. But why? First, what's the life span for most electronics at this point? That factors into desire. What happens beyond our death is only of academic concern to us. To assume it won't factor into their decision making process is just speculation.
And if you presume we'd have programmed this general AI with the desire, well, it's not really a general AI, is it? We've robbed it of a decision. We've taken an entire forest of decision trees from it. It can't not choose to colonize the stars.
Then you're also making the assumption that general AI won't come to the conclusion that colonizing the stars is an inefficient use of resources. General AI doesn't really change the problems with the Fermi paradox, it only seems to add new problems.
That's not how I think about it at all. I think you're underestimating how alien AI could be to us, in general. I.e., I think you're anthropomorphising it unnecessarily.
There's an idea called the orthogonality thesis, which says: The intelligence of an arbitrary agent can vary independently of its goals.
Here, I'm using intelligence to mean just the ability of an agent to generate/evaluate/execute plans to further its goals. A modern chess AI on modern hardware is more intelligent than one from the 1980s. In principle, you could have any arbitrary utility function attached to any level of intelligence.
This idea was brought up because often, when people heard about the paperclip maximiser (an agent that tries to maximize the number of paperclips- and thus wants to take apart everything in its lightcone and turn it into paperclips), they said: "But why would something so clever do something so stupid and pointless? A superintelligence would surely realize it was being stupid and decide to do something smarter."
But there's no reason to think this! When you take away the agent's goal of maximising paperclips, there's no perfect platonic ghost of consciousness left! The paperclip maximiser, as defined is just an algorithm that predicts the future, looking for actions that maximise paperclips, and executes them. Given unbounded compute power, it can just look through arbitrarily many counterfactual simulations of the future given different plans, pick the plan that maximises the number of paperclip-like structures in the universe, and execute it. The rest is implementation details, given we don't have unbounded computing power, but the point is such a system doesn't need to be conscious to be powerful.
If you have an AI without a utility function, you don't have an AI. 'General intelligence' just means the AI's computing/reasoning/versatility power, in a vague sense. It has nothing to do with whatever particular utility function an agent might be trying to maximize.
The paperclip machine doesn't 'want' to colonize the stars; it's just a system that will do that if it can, because tautologically, it's a system that tries to turn as much as it can into paperclips.
I don't really think there is a Fermi 'paradox'. We don't have solid priors on how often agents arise in the universe. The fact there aren't any visible aliens should either just lower our estimates of how likely life is, or maybe there's some sort of anthropic principle argument to be made here where we probably wouldn't observe a universe where aliens come to visit, because in nearly all possible universes where intelligent life survives and goes from star to star it just eats all the stars very quickly on astronomical timescales or something, such that the chances of intelligent agents like us arising while there's visible evidence of other agents is incredibly slim.
To say there is a platonic consciousness is kind of saying you know what that looks like. And to say that you could grant something an intelligence capable of solving the problem of colonizing the stars while also denying it the ability to choose its own goals is an assumption I'm not willing to grant.
In other words, there is "a reason to think this!" We are that reason. Other life on this planet is reason to think this.
We could also be a zoo/prison planet far into enemy territory. Currently being experimented and observed. Hybridization in order to infiltrate our actual civilization that’s located elsewhere.
> Why, then, have we found no irrefutable evidence of aliens visiting Earth?
We have evidence, it just gets "refuted" for psychological reasons. The Fermi Paradox is a Rorschach test, and has nothing to do with reality.
In reality, humans in every culture have recorded incidents of communications with non-human intelligences.[0]
In reality, the Brazilian Military has gotten much less coy about UFO phenomenon in recent years and has started declassifying documents. Their overall conclusion is that, whatever they are, UFOs are real, pose no national security threat, and should be researched and discussed by society at large, with some urgency.
Here's a fascinating lecture by a Brazilian UFO researcher about the overall situation in Brazil and he describes three encounters that are known to have government involvement (so the researchers know what to ask about, in these cases.)
"Operation Saucer - UFO military encounters in the Brazilian jungle" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThkmRsEBOY0
> In 1977, numerous UFOs were seen in the Brazilian city of Colares, Pará. The UFOs fired light beams at people, causing injuries and sucking blood from 400 witnesses. After a rise in local concern, the mayor of the city requested help from the Air Force. Operation Saucer started, during which numerous photos were taken and testimonies collected. Operation Saucer is just one of the compelling cases which A. J. Gevaerd, editor of Brazilian UFO magazine, talked about in his latest lecture in Copenhagen, paving the way for complete Disclosure in his country. Kudos to Exopolitics Denmark for setting up their excellent annual conference at the Danish National Museum on September 26 in Copenhagen!
The first case involves thousands of people, living on an island in the Amazon, who were attacked by UFOs over a period of several years (1975-1977 IIRC). Flying cans with visible pilots were shooting people with bending "light" beams and sucking up their blood. It got so bad that thousands of people evacuated and the Brazilian Army sent in a unit to find out what was going on and try to make contact. I won't spoil the rest of the story here.
To me, the strangest thing I can see is the question: Why would people (aliens or humans) who have evidently advanced technology go around attacking poor villagers to suck their blood!? WTF?
[0] (I myself once attended a event at an airport hotel at which some purple telepathic space dolphins were guest lecturers. FWIW, their basic TL;DR: was "Be nice to each other." Aliens were attending underground raves in Seattle in the 90's.)
> sucking blood from 400 witnesses
Pick one.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to trivialize what these folks went through. I'm pointing out that the threat was in a small, localized area.
Discovery of peculiar periodic spectral modulations in a small fraction of solar type stars
https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.03031
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/aaeae0/...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/earlvontapia/16211171391
I really wanted more of the Milky Way to pop out, but was hard given the sensor and the lens I was using.
We don’t know how to colonize other star systems, so we don’t really know the factors at play. How easy is it to travel to another planet and start a colony? We don’t know. How likely is it that that colony will colonize other planets? We don’t know. We are taking numbers we guessed and multiplying with other numbers we guessed to get to an answer. If any of them are much off the answer doesn’t make sense?
What if the amount of resources to successfully travel to and colonize a planet in another solar system is so high that the vast majority of attempts fail and only a few attempts can be made? We can have n (pick some random large number) intelligent civilizations in our galaxy and not know a thing about them.
Some examples I am thinking of, and I am certain people will have more... All are compounded by the LY distances between colonies and whatever home is:
- Terraforming - It would be the exception that new planets are 100% hospitable to a specific species. How long to properly terraform, and then how long before the can get to a point where they can launch a new sub-colony? Need proper population, technology and resources.
- Culture drift - how long can the colony and home share the same culture, with same values and objectives?
- Political drift - Imagine you are part of a colony, with "home" some 4 LY away. How long before you will want to have full autonomy, specially given the distance?
- Cultural and political factions - Is it possible that individuals in the colony have different objectives, resulting with political infighting or open war? What would then be the impact on the colony?
- Protection - Depending on technological advancement, how can a colony protect itself from external rogue elements (big warship gone rogue, pirating the colonies for resources?)
For sure, many of these things depend on the type of species colonizing its region, how much sentience and free will they have. I also assume they haven't solved FTL travel!