Old (2006), Luddite-licious, and awfully full of presumed universality.
Of course we've transitioned into a virtual economy (though we haven't): the virtual economy didn't exist, and neither did the ability to provide intangible services to the degree that is possible now.
And of course an MIT engineer goes into video games, how many can NASA possibly employ? How many engineers were designing boring old toasters and dishwashers during the space race? Did we lament that?
Kind of a bummer. I was expecting the article to be about the density of the universe and the speed of light and whatnot. Instead we've got alien porn to blame. Which, if I know anything about aliens, should be reaching us in the next decade or so.
...edit...
oooo, and I just thought of somethng. Or, they got so advanced that they realized they probably shouldn't alert the rest of the damn galaxy to their presence. Given how the human mind seems to be so accepting of things it doesn't understand.
Almost everything good and bad that humans have done is due to the drive of a SMALL number of (or single) individuals (American Decl. of Independence, Soviet revolution, Indian freedom struggle, race to colonize the world, WW2, 9/11, Iraq invasion).
That is why it doesn't matter if 99.999% of the world is pre-occupied with one mindvirus or other. It's the 1-in-100k person who really takes humanity to the next level of greatness/depravity.
There will always be ambitious people for whom this world will be too small: they will colonize the next planet.
It may be useful for finding ideas to earn money, but I have seen no indications that crowd sourcing is at all useful for solving complex questions, designing complex machinery, or discovering any form of truth.
Also, the crowd sourcing aspect of the whole protein folding thing merely involved doing the grunt work, of which there was so much the scientists that set up the parameters for it couldn't possibly do it all themselves. The true achievement was thinking up the parameters for the thousands of monkeys to twiddle, not the twiddling itself.
Never heard of that before. But yeah, after looking it up on Wikipedia, you're right.
So let me correct it - it's not the exception that proves the rule, it's yet another example of crowd sourcing contributing little of true significance.
The whole "great men made history" meme is kind of discredited. It's true to a point, and it's certainly a lot more interesting (therefore easy to remember) if you say that WWII was Hitler vs. Churchill and Stalin, but it's not entirely correct.
In science, it might just be 1% of the top 1% who make the big breakthroughs - how many times did one guy make more than one really huge breakthrough? I can think of one big fuzzy-haired counterexample.
Article assumes that humans aren't reproducing, when in-fact, there are more humans today then yesterday, and will be more in the future than there are today.
To advance as a species, we don't need everyone in the species to advance, just a select few who take everyone with them as they discover new things.
It's a fair guess that humanity will become extinct because of problems in the narcissistic sector. It comes down to Baudrillard's "classical analysis of Disneyland" and the fact that Jon Stewart and Glenn Beck are more emotionally satisfying than actual political commentators. Put the postmodern factors together and it gets hard to believe that humans will find political solutions to the problems of the 21st century.
As for why we haven't met aliens, I think there are two more fundamental causes.
(1) In 2011 we know that many stars have planets. This should be no big surprise based on considerations of angular momentum. The trouble is that Jupiter-sized planets tend to get sucked into the accretion disks of their stars, and in the process they tend to destroy Earth-sized planets that exist in the habitable zone. Planetary systems are common, but habitable terrestrial planets are rare.
(2) Interstellar travel and communication is highly difficult. It's possible that some civilization will manage an interstellar travel event among billions of civilizations and billions of years. However, the percolation threshold for a self-sustaining and growing interstellar civilization will never be reached. (Civilizations won't establish an outpost around a secondary star and create additional colonies)
A few years ago I did an analysis of interstellar war. The obvious mode of attack is to launch a deadly bombardment against a planet before any possible counterattack. One clear conclusion was that if you launched a missile that traveled at 10% of the speed of light, it wouldn't matter much if that missile were tipped with a hydrogen bomb or not -- you just can't get enough energy from either nuclear fusion or fission to propel a starship at a reasonable speed. (If you go slow, a 1000-year generation starship would need tons of antimatter simply to keep warm.) Note that interstellar hydrogen would impact such a starship at high velocities harder than radiation from a nuclear reactor.
The corollary is that neither fusion energy nor fission energy is sufficient for interstellar propulsion
Fun off handed anecdote I heard today: a study found that people who watch Jon Colbert were more up to date on news than those who watched Fox News. No idea were it came from, could be bull shit, but not unbelievable to me.
As the populations keeps growing, we will keep moving away the lifestyle our minds and bodies are evolutionary suited for, causing more depression/discontent. So, we're going to have no choice but create stronger drugs, and ways to drown our discontent. That's why the entertainment industry will always be recession-free. Without iPhone games, movies, video games, etc, we'd all go crazy. We either need pointless distractions, or we need to fight to survive.
If alien species limited themselves to entertainment for such a long time, then where are the broadcasts from other solar systems?
On the other hand, recent studies apparently hint that things like electrical and gravitational constants may not be the same everywhere, so maybe they don't transmit their signals with light.
One more thing is that the argument that the age of the universe combined with its propensity to make life means there must be some intelligent life can also be applied to the probability that some intelligent life will wake up and save themselves from such a bad fate, as the author hints in the last paragraph. It doesn't mean all species get caught in that trap and never escape, it just means it's harder to become a species that saved itself from the perils of materialism, loss of social justice, and falsehood.
One reason I've read about is that when you consider humanity we were only broadcasting radio communication for a sliver of our history before we started using buried cables as a way to facilitate communication. The theory is that other civilizations would figure out the same thing and there is a limited window of time to intercept their radio communication.
The physicist David Deutsch makes the point that there is no real way to distinguish a consistent, convincing virtual reality from reality itself.
Therefore, there is no real moral difference between richly populating such virtual worlds (once we can construct them--we can't quite, yet) and populating actual other planets. Nick Bostrom would say that even using the word "actual" is probably wrong, since we're likely living in a simulation already.
There's a simpler (maybe too obvious) answer to the Fermi Paradox: the window of time in which it seems worthwhile to communicate with aliens or to settle the galaxy is exceedingly brief.
Interesting point. Based on what the author of this post is saying I wonder if the average human were given the option to enter a virtual reality where they could set the parameters to whatever they want would people know the difference or even care to find out? If you could have any beautiful woman you want, a great body, and great financials who would want to leave that fantasy?
One obstacle might be that by entering the VR, you'd be ceding a lot of control to the people "outside" your reality--they might gain physical advantage over you or hack your VR.
But if that concern could be definitively answered--and I think it could--then quite possibly the VR is a good move. Maybe any preference for our outside, non-simulative reality will in time be seen as narrow-minded chauvinism.
The main obstacle for me seems to be that by entering the VR, you're actually getting your chances to reproduce down to exactly zero. By the way, a good book on this subject is "the machine stops" from the early 1900s...
If that is a priority, you can reproduce manifoldly inside the VR. Why disprefer those children? It's possible to make the simulation run as long in subjective time as the outside universe.
I agree with the article that we're likely to eventually find virtual worlds more interesting and fulfilling than outer space. I do not agree that we should look down on these VRs or be alarmed or disappointed by this possibility.
We haven't been around long enough.
Consider that a healthy 100 year lifespan now constitutes about a full 1% of recorded human history.
Humanity is about at the stage of a toddler saying "I can do that" with nary a clue as to what that means.
My friends and I sometimes joke around about a similar 'solution' to the Fermi Paradox, where a civilization will advance until they figure out how to simulate sex in the mind of an individual.
Though somewhat, if the conclusions of the article are correct (I don't think they are), then those who will inherit the earth will be the ones least likely to venture out and make contact.
A terrible article. So let's say something more interesting. There are several important ideas intertwined together around the Fermi Paradox:
1) Fermi Paradox
Why haven't we seen any evidence in the observable universe of megascale activities and exponential growth comparable to those that we know that our descendants will be capable of, and fairly soon?
Can we convert our entire future light cone into computronium? There seems to be no physical laws to prevent that outcome, and absent being stopped soon, the tiny fraction of our machine descendants to go all out for self-replication and expansion will set this program in motion.
3) The Great Filter
Assuming we're in base reality and everything out there is running much as our present physics understands it to run, are we past the barrier that stops intelligences from converting the observable universe into computronium? Or not?
All these are linked via this rather depressing line of thought:
"A technologically mature “posthuman” civilization would have enormous computing power. Based on this empirical fact, the simulation argument shows that at least one of the following propositions is true:
- The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero;
- The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero;
- The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.
If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any relatively wealthy individuals who desire to run ancestor-simulations and are free to do so. If (3) is true, then we almost certainly live in a simulation. In the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion one’s credence roughly evenly between (1), (2), and (3).
Unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation."
----
The bottom line is that there appears to be a large gap in our understanding of the evolution of intelligence in the universe. By all counts, our galaxy should have many civilizations across its span, and by all counts if they're anything like us, their most aggressive descendant factions will turn the whole galaxy into computronium in a few tens of millions of years. But we don't see even the first glimmers of any such thing.
Wow, thanks for links 3 and 4. I bet just about everyone here has had a similar idea to the the "Simulation Argument." I could never find any official name for it though.
How hilarious would that be if reality was in fact a simulation and the ones watching us get the biggest kick out of everyone trying to figure out why we're here. I guess that assumes that the creators of this simulation have a sense of humor.
Possible answer: First nearly every civilization that mastered, say, radio, did it millions of years ago. Second, nearly every such civilization long ago found much better means of communications than we know about. Third, they realize that trying to communicate via radio is silly and use much better means we don't know about. Net, they are out there and communicating, but we don't hear them and they don't hear us or bother with us. To hear us, they would have to be within 100 light years, and that's not far enough to cover many candidate planets.
But if they're so advanced, they probably still have radio receivers somewhere though. They should be able to receive our signals and reply with some sort of super advanced method that appears as radio waves so that we can receive them, but that travel much faster so it doesn't take a thousand years to reach us.
I like the idea that these advanced civilizations are actually all around us and just don't interact with us at all because we are too stupid/too boring/not ready/etc.
They're all down there thinking "why aren't there any alien bacteria sending us some chemical messages already? It's clearly the best way to communicate"
Then we presume that all these advanced civilizations are somehow living peacefully together AND that they all agree not to mess with earth. That's extraordinarily unlikely. Evolution isn't good at producing life forms that peacefully co-exist.
That is my preferred explanation as well. A caveman would not notice a WiFi signal even if it was blasting right through the cave; he would probably be looking for smoke signals or something.
Also, a huge intelligence gap makes communication uninteresting. e.g. we know a little bit about how ants communicate via pheromones, but we're not trying to send "messages" to them; what would it possibly be useful to say?
> First nearly every civilization that mastered, say, radio, did it millions of years ago
So then we'd expect to receive signals from civilizations that are a few million light years away. Yet we don't see those signals.
We're too young a civilization to be spotted by other life forms (as you said, they'd have to be within a 100 light years or so). But when we look at space in any direction it looks dead. Just background radiation.
A point in my guess is that an old civilization won't be trying to use radio to communicate with us and will be using something better than radio we don't know about. Next, for communications over 1000 light years with just radio, there can be some issues of signal to noise ratio!
Sure, we can see a star 1000 light years away, a galaxy 1 billion light years away, and a quasar 10 billion light years away, but a signal from a planet over 1000 light years away? Besides, 1000 light years may not be far enough to cover many planets transmitting. Our galaxy is, what, 100,000 light years across? So, just for our galaxy, might want to think about distances of 50,000 light years or so. The nearest ordinary galaxy is the one in Andromeda, and that's about 1.5 million light years away.
Those are long distances for a radio signal from a planet.
"A point in my guess is that an old civilization won't be trying to use radio to communicate with us and will be using something better than radio we don't know about."
While a popular conjecture in this recurring debate, over the decades we've built up an awful lot of evidence that there really is no better mechanism for distance communication than electromagnetic radiation. We're running out of places for such putatively better mechanisms to hide.
I dislike this line of argument in the modern time, because it conflates two discussions, "what we scientifically know about the universe", and "could conceivable be true even though we have no evidence for our conjectures". While the second may be superficially more fun, it's ultimately a waste of time for any sort of serious discussion because you can hypothesize anything you want. It's content-free, despite the haze of words you can throw up. The first is much more interesting, and while 50 years ago one could still hypothesize better communication mechanisms, I think the argument when used in a serious discussion is out of date. We can name some non-EM communication mechanisms (neutrino beams, for instance), but they all suck horribly by comparison.
That we don't know everything is scientifically rock solid!
Your point is mostly that the stuff we don't know is bad science; I agree.
Still, this thread is to try to answer the question, where is ET?
Historically it would have been better to assume that there was stuff unknown that was better as an explanation than the stuff we did know, going WAY back: The Earth is a ball riding on the back of a turtle? We understood balls and turtles but not gravity of spheres! The earth is a ball held up by Hercules? Similar. To keep the sun moving across the sky we have to pour blood on this special rock? The planets are from wheels rolling in wheels? The stars are light coming through holes in ths sky? The sun is a fire based on coal? The Milky Way is all of the universe? The universe is expanding so there are just three cases, (1) keep expanding but more and more slowly, (2) stop expanding and reach 'steady state', (3) quit expanding and contract into a big crunch. It was ALL wrong! And in all cases the right answer was from things we didn't know yet!
For "We're running out of places for such putatively better mechanisms to hide". Ah, it's always been such! Where was Newton going to look for a solution to the orbit of Mercury? Where was Newton going to look for why he couldn't make gold with chemical reactions? The big bang seems to have things moving faster than the speed of light; where to look? We're not getting the right flow rate of neutrinos from the sun; where to look? Essentially all life on earth is just from DNA; so where to look for the reason there is no other mechanism?
But just now we have at least two biggie places to look: Dark matter and dark energy. About both, we don't have hardly a clue. We are unsure about the Higgs field. We haven't unified gravity. We haven't detected gravitational waves. We're unsure about why galaxies have black holes at their centers. There remain questiona about the 'size' of our universe, especially given the evidence about the flatness of the geometry. We're really mixed up about EPR.
But not all is lost! Some of the new telescopes on the way into orbit are amazing, maybe count the hairs on the back of ETs head! Maybe!
So, why haven't we heard from ET? My guess, stated as just a guess, is that ET communicates by means we don't understand yet. Is this answer solid science? Nope! Might it be correct? Yup! Is there some historical, circumstantial evidence for it? Yup. Are we still in the dark? Yup.
I just want you to be clear on the fact that you are deliberately choosing to leave science behind and have entered the realm of science fiction. It used to be a lot more sensible to speculate that way, but the thing is, if there is some 'mysterious' way to communicate we can say with great confidence that it probably isn't useful from an engineering standpoint.
"Dark matter and dark energy."
We aren't as ignorant about them as you might think. For them to be useful for communication would require them to also not have the properties that they appear to have.
This fashionable claiming of extreme ignorance isn't quite as silly as the fashionable affectation of self-species-loathing in this debate, but it's only slightly more sensible...
... of course, part of it is that few people have learned enough math or the relevant science to actually understand just how thoroughly, for instance, FTL really isn't going to happen, or understand enough information theory to understand why communication channels must actually have certain properties to be useful, regardless of their form.
> I just want you to be clear on the fact that you are deliberately choosing to leave science behind and have entered the realm of science fiction.
Not really: I'm guessing. Or in more erudite terms, I'm conjecturing.
You seem to be saying that science is what is all wrapped up and solid and that anything else is "science fiction". That's a bit rigid! Also that view would keep us from ever discussing the unknown before it becomes known, and science is a long march through millions of small and dozens of huge cases of the unknown becoming known.
Indeed, if read Einstein's special relativity paper, it reads like conjecture or guessing. That is, when he wrote the paper it was not at all clear that the Lorentz transformation had any physical reality. That paper became accepted as the real physics only later.
There's no solid proof that we can't go faster than light (FTL), and I have much more than enough math and plenty of science to have seen the arguments.
Sure, for any particle with ordinary mass as we know it, as it goes faster through space and approaches light speed, its mass increases and at the speed of light would be infinitely large. Right. So, for that case, FTL would be impossible.
But we don't really know the deeper mechanism for this mass increase. Thus we are like someone in the 18th century saying that travel faster than 60 MPH would be impossible because no horse could move its legs fast enough. That is, once we understand the deeper mechanism that establishes the speed of light speed limit, maybe we could find a way around the mechanism and the limit. The mechanism seems likely connected with the Higgs field, and we don't understand that very well yet.
E.g., we know so little about dark matter we can't be very sure it can't go faster than the speed of light.
For dark energy, we are assuming conservation of energy much as we understand it, estimating the energy of dark energy, assuming that E = mc^2 also applies there, assuming that how matter and energy curve space in general relativity continues to apply, and then concluding the huge mass of dark energy. That's a lot of assumptions from extrapolations. We're assuming that what we see for ordinary matter in accelerators applies to dark energy; that's a GUESS.
So, in science we need to be able to talk about possibilities not yet established. Such "talk" is not the best science, but it's also not "science fiction".
I wish this had been a root level comment (so it would be more visible). I think this is by far the most plausible explanation especially if you think about human history and technology differences.
Imagine our current spy agencies with bleeding edge technology spying on the Romans. Its only a two thousand year difference, but there's absolutely no way they could detect our signals and/or equipment (unless we made a serious mistake).
It seems entirely reasonable that another civilization may be tens of thousands of years ahead of us in technological advancement. If you consider the increasing growth rate of technological advancement, its easy to see your explanation.
Let's see: We've been okay with radio for less than 200 years so far. The earth was formed ballpark 4.5 billion years ago. The big bang was about 13.7 billion years ago.
Assume that to get a civilization need a planet and, thus, elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Those heavier elements are created in big stars that supernova, that is, have their cores collapse under gravity and blow off their outer layers where during the explosion all the heavier elements in the periodic table are created by fusing together lighter elements. So to get a planet, have to have a star form, burn out, and supernova. So, assume that are getting candidate planets 3.7 billion years after the big bang. Then have been forming candidate planets for 10 billion years.
Now take the planets that have achieved mastry of radio (i.e., working with photons from 60 Hz up to gamma rays). Take the date when they first made this progress with radio. Take the distribution of those dates over the planets. That distribution is 'concentrated' on the last 10 billion years. Now in that distribution spread out over 10 billion years, what is the probability mass of the last million years? It's TINY. Maybe it's 0.01%. Then 99.99% of the civilizations that mastered radio did it over one million years ago and, thus, are a million years or more ahead of us. Done.
The issue is not radio waves--it's Dyson spheres (look it up). It does not take very long at all for a space-faring civilization to advance to such a point that it's artifacts would be (spectrographically) visible from our telescopes today.
It doesn't have to be Dyson spheres either. A large object moving near the speed of light through the interstellar medium would give off one of a few very specific and very strong spectral lines. Now there hasn't been a concerted effort to look for interstellar travelers, but nevertheless in all our years of searching such oddities haven't shown up.
Our nearest other star is 4 light years away. 1000 light years away may still not cover many planets good for ET to colonize. But for us now to see evidence of a colony on a planet 1000 light years away or more would be TOUGH.
Note: The planet hunters mostly don't actually see the planets but just shadows or evidence in star wobbles, etc.
But we are putting up some new telescopes with some astounding resolution, etc.
Agreed on it being a terrible article. Way too many 'clever' turns of phrase. Why make a statement when you can juxtapose some pop culture references? Seems much more of an act of self indulgence than the condemning of one...
But as for your list I think you left out the Occam's razor option:
Plus, if an exponentially-reproducing civilization appeared even in a neighboring galaxy a couple million years ago, we'd probably be able to notice something very strange.
If it appeared in this galaxy, we'd probably never have evolved.
Regarding #2, there is also the possibility that if a civilization converted its light cone into computronium, we would not notice. Maybe because they used exotic matter as a substrate and that matter did not strongly interact with the rest of the universe. Or maybe they figured out how to "escape" this universe by creating a computer that can perform and infinite amount of computation without affecting its surroundings. This idea is explored in Greg Egan's Permutation City where the main plot involves creating a new pocket universe for simulated beings with access to an infinite amount of computation but can be bootstrapped on a normal computer.
I like reading about the rapture of the nerds as much as the next guy but you are calling this article terrible and then stacking a few layers of conjecture on top of each other and treating it as fact.
It is simply way way too early for us to assume that there are hard to reach limits to computation. For all we know there could be problems that need to be solved that are not realistically solved using computation or the problems get exponentially more complex faster than their solutions exponentially increase our computing ability or the necessary complexity of the systems increases too quickly to manage.
(no, waving a "true AI" magic wand doesn't make these disappear, it buries them in another layer of conjecture)
We can't even solve the damned P vs NP problem yet!
> Can we convert our entire future
> light cone into computronium? There
> seems to be no physical laws to prevent
> that outcome
Let me rephrase that in a more scientific way: No one has disproved that this is impossible. It's a bit of cheat to phrase it this way when we don't even know what those physical laws would look like so have no idea of whether or not we know of any laws that would prevent that outcome.
There is only one definitely true thing about these types of predictions, they are interesting, inspiring, necessary and a few generations from now they will be looked at the same way we look at the rocket pack/floating city/flying car predictions of previous generations (which is the same way they looked at the previous futurist predictions and so on)
Your post seems to boil down to "there are reasons why it is impossible to build a Dyson sphere out of computing substrate from the materials that surround the average star" - which is a fairly extraordinary claim at this point. Everything we know about matter and energy says that this is in fact possible, and a weight of rigorous work exists to show that this is the case.
Remember that we're talking about timescales of millions of years here.
I certainly didn't mean to imply there are reasons it's impossible, it's just a meaningless.
My point was that first you would have to define what computronium actually is before you can comment on what physical laws apply. It might also be useful to wait until we understand the physical laws that would apply at that scale, which we don't.
There are no physical laws that make rocket packs or flying cities impossible either, we just discovered that some aspects are either impractical or we just found a better solution to the same problems.
I don't want to sound like I think these kinds of thought experiments are in any way bad, I love them.
The best case scenario is that our thought experiments now are like davinci's helicopters. Ridiculous because of our ignorance of the natural world but still extraordinarily clever and farsighted. A more likely case is that they are downright stupid because of that same ignorance.
The opinion that an idea we've had or could understand is anything like what construction projects with timescales of millions of years will look like is the silliest kind of hubris. Especially when you start arguing over physical laws of imaginary vaguely defined substances.
Are you calling it a "terrible article" because the author talks about other things than you would have, or because it's not rigorous? The first is not much of a criticism, and the second is rife in your comment.
Has anyone thought about this...astronauts release their waste into space. There's bacteria that gets frozen almost as soon as it leaves the ship/space station right? Couldn't it stay preserved until it lands on a distant planet that hasn't formed an atmosphere and be the seeds for life on infant planets? I'm no physicist (or scientist, period), but it's just a question that's been bugging me for a while.
Hahaha thanks. I read somewhere that at the same time you think of a grand new idea, 10 people somewhere in the world will also have the same idea. I doubt that's always true, but it's pretty amazing nonetheless.
Twas ever thus. Look at how many great inventions and discoveries throughout history were arrived at independently and then argued for the bragging rights, before it became such a priority to share your ideas. Calculus and television spring immediately to mind, but there are many others.
This is very similar to the idea Charles Stross presents in his 2005 novel Accelerando which in turn used the idea of a Matrioshka Brain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain).
Let's imagine there are billions of planets out there (a true Sagan-esque billions) which have spawned intelligences that have achieved interstellar travel - ie. they have the ability to actively seek out and communicate with others of similar ability. Perhaps like the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek, except many, many of these, separated from others by various degrees of intelligence or ability.
Let's imagine there are far more planets like ours that have life - let's throw intelligence out, because that is defined by some relative standard - which has not yet reached that capability. Why would we be interesting in the scope of these far more advanced extraterrestrial societies?
Perhaps they don't reach out because it would be as fruitless as us trying to communicate with ants. Perhaps they don't care to study us because we seem about as interesting as primordial soup (ie. a nuclear holocaust might be a trait of that). Perhaps intelligences like ours are well understood, well classified in the genus of the universe, and we are about as ordinary as a barnacle on the hull of a tug boat.
True, but if these super-advanced aliens are populating many planets, then we'd presumably be able to detect them somehow, irrespective of whether they care about us.
It may be electromagnetic leakage or Dyson spheres or any of a number of other signs of artifice.
Maybe our universe runs in their VM. I don't know how you can assume that we would be able to detect anyone. If they are smarter than us, they'd know how to hide.
If we run in their VM, then the Fermi paradox still applies--since physics is consistent in this VM and seemingly leads frequently to life, why wouldn't we see signs of it elsewhere in the galaxy?
If the "we're like ants/barnacles to them" theory is true, then they wouldn't bother intentionally hiding from us, because we're no threat to them. If they do it unintentionally, that would still be interesting: for example, it would probably mean that civilizations do not in fact aggressively colonize the galaxy.
Perhaps life is common (happened about a billion years ago here), but intelligent life is not (about 100,000 years ago, give or take).
Perhaps without FTL drive, it takes what explorers there might be a long time between (expensive!) visits, so sightings are rare. Without FTL, and without some kind of cold-sleep, a journey to the nearest stars pretty much takes a lifetime. A few would go, but not many.
It's too late (bedtime) for me to slap "Drake's equation" type numbers on this, but hopefully you get the idea. Maybe we've not seen anybody because they only visit any given planet every million years or so, and "they" equals 2 or 3 species local enough to even bother with that paltry schedule.
I'm not saying there is anybody out there, just that lacking pure freaking magic technology, it's a hell of a trip to make if they were. OTOH, if there is an outpost 100 light-years away, expect a visit in another 100 to 1000 years???
Primordial soup is interesting. If we had any of it to study, we'd have hundreds of postdocs studying it right now, as we have lots of labs studying all sorts of things that are not obviously useful.
Any species that didn't have intellectual curiosity about things that aren't obvious useful would probably never make it off its home planet. A lot of the math and science that underlies stuff we use every day didn't seem useful when it was developed - see, for example, the theory of computation, worked out when there were no computers, and without which there probably still wouldn't be any computers.
Honestly if the human race discovered a less evolved colony on the moon, I wouldn't want to know what we would end up doing to them. Most likely Nike would figure out a way to put them in cages and force them to make shoes every day. I think the reason why we fear aliens is because its a reflection of what we know we would likely end up doing to a lesser lifeform.
Oddly enough, I think its an optimistic outcome if we play video games and never meet aliens in that if they function like us, it will be either us exploiting them or them exploiting us unless we amazingly are right on par with each other. Sorry to be so pessimistic, its just that we have consistently failed pretty hard as a race in how we treat other creatures and the environment.
He rather defeats his point at the last by pointing out that subcultures that specifically deny artificial or damaging fitness indicators would then take over. It seems unlikely that some few out of billions wouldn't make a different choice, and pass that choice on to their children.
Basically he purposes that there is either a barrier somewhere before our point of biological progress or after; as he explains in the video, the desired reality is that we have already surpassed that barrier. He reasons that space travel is a simple engineering challenge compared to evolving intelligent life on the cosmological scale, so there's less reason to believe the barrier lies after our point of progress.
I think we haven't met any Aliens because we're selfish, paranoid, violent, irrational, un-evolved monkeys with baseball caps and video games and nobody wants to make friends people who happily destroy their environment [and therefore themselves] because it's easier than cleaning up their mess. Our major societies are full of petty, self-serving, closed-minded assholes and i'm a perfect example of that.
The technology-enslavement theory is bunk because humans pretty much tend to self-correct over time. We start destroying the environment, somebody notices, we start pulling back on our rampant destruction enough to keep things operating. An epidemic of fat kids goes on, people start complaining, and schools begin the process of sort-of making their lunches healthier. If it got so bad that we almost destroy ourselves from too much internet use somebody would start complaining and we'd reign back on that too.
Probably the real reason we haven't met any is that they probably have agreements that they don't come down and show themselves to new planets until the new planet's peoples advance their space technology to an appropriate level; ours is still kind of dark-ages technology. Maybe after the military invests we can have a nice big boom in space travel.
We did? That's great news. It must be recent though, so far i've only heard a lot of talk and a few useless feel good activities for guilty first worlders to distract themselves with like recycling their pop cans.
As far as self correction goes, the only thing any species has proved to be good at long term is going extinct.
Unfortunately that's mostly accomplished through economic means of displacing the mess to poorer places. Our actual levels of consumption and destruction globally has only increased.
As another example: China is now starting to clean up. They won't be able to displace the mess to poorer places, because the country is just so big that there just aren't enough poorer places left to take all the mess. I am confident the Chinese will be able to clean up their country.
I think they will as well. India will shortly have to address this seriously and probably will.
That covers the types of pollution and over-consumption that are a visible and immediate threat, like dumping toxic waste in rivers and highly toxic air pollution.
There has been no serious willingness to address the issues of the increase in per-captia consumption of finite resources.
I was really taking issue with the statement that humans will be the first species that does not reproduce and consume as much as it possibly can before partial or complete extinction. That somehow humans will naturally reign in their natural impulses before it becomes too dangerous. That statement is based on zero evidence. We think we are the exception, humans are good at that, individually and collectively. Here's hoping.
Half way through the article I was in a bit of agreement with the writer about how our need for immediate gratification is so easily satisfied by the virtual supplements we get everyday and how it weighs us down overall as a society of humans; but all of a sudden he moves to assumes that people who are classified as religious fundamentalists, for some reason, seem to have figured it all out! Clearly the author is contradicting himself here. It is very unlikely (I would say impossible, but there's always an outlier somewhere) that someone who happens to be a religious fundamentalist would also not have delusions of "fitness-faking". What a terrible end to an article that could have been such an awesome topic of discussion.
My theory is that we haven't met aliens yet because the aliens have been to earth sereptitiously, have taken some DNA samples, and have decided there's nothing to be gained from making contact with us. They've told everyone else in the universe that the planet is hostile and not particularly technologically developed. They have also noted that it is not a threat just as long as they don't get advanced space travel technology. The best way to keep them from getting advanced space travel technology is to not communicate with them and thus leave them to their own devices. Additionally, based on the alien's models of planetary development, they have come to the conclusion that our civilization will not develop decent space travel before it collapses due to natural resource depletion.
The universe is a big place. There are probably trillions of habitable planets. We're just not that special. Maybe one day, if we somehow become "worth it", they'll stop by.
That's true. I mean, what if our 5 senses just can't pick up on other, radically different types of life. And whatever life forms may have visited us may not have the senses to pick up that we're here.
230 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadOf course we've transitioned into a virtual economy (though we haven't): the virtual economy didn't exist, and neither did the ability to provide intangible services to the degree that is possible now.
And of course an MIT engineer goes into video games, how many can NASA possibly employ? How many engineers were designing boring old toasters and dishwashers during the space race? Did we lament that?
If we are to develop easy space access, not nearly enough.
...edit...
oooo, and I just thought of somethng. Or, they got so advanced that they realized they probably shouldn't alert the rest of the damn galaxy to their presence. Given how the human mind seems to be so accepting of things it doesn't understand.
Maybe even an intergalactic SOPA is in place!
That is why it doesn't matter if 99.999% of the world is pre-occupied with one mindvirus or other. It's the 1-in-100k person who really takes humanity to the next level of greatness/depravity.
There will always be ambitious people for whom this world will be too small: they will colonize the next planet.
Also, the crowd sourcing aspect of the whole protein folding thing merely involved doing the grunt work, of which there was so much the scientists that set up the parameters for it couldn't possibly do it all themselves. The true achievement was thinking up the parameters for the thousands of monkeys to twiddle, not the twiddling itself.
So let me correct it - it's not the exception that proves the rule, it's yet another example of crowd sourcing contributing little of true significance.
In science, it might just be 1% of the top 1% who make the big breakthroughs - how many times did one guy make more than one really huge breakthrough? I can think of one big fuzzy-haired counterexample.
So if by some accident we missed a genius, she would probably be replaced by a bunch of merely clever people.
We depend on weird people.
To advance as a species, we don't need everyone in the species to advance, just a select few who take everyone with them as they discover new things.
As for why we haven't met aliens, I think there are two more fundamental causes.
(1) In 2011 we know that many stars have planets. This should be no big surprise based on considerations of angular momentum. The trouble is that Jupiter-sized planets tend to get sucked into the accretion disks of their stars, and in the process they tend to destroy Earth-sized planets that exist in the habitable zone. Planetary systems are common, but habitable terrestrial planets are rare.
(2) Interstellar travel and communication is highly difficult. It's possible that some civilization will manage an interstellar travel event among billions of civilizations and billions of years. However, the percolation threshold for a self-sustaining and growing interstellar civilization will never be reached. (Civilizations won't establish an outpost around a secondary star and create additional colonies)
A few years ago I did an analysis of interstellar war. The obvious mode of attack is to launch a deadly bombardment against a planet before any possible counterattack. One clear conclusion was that if you launched a missile that traveled at 10% of the speed of light, it wouldn't matter much if that missile were tipped with a hydrogen bomb or not -- you just can't get enough energy from either nuclear fusion or fission to propel a starship at a reasonable speed. (If you go slow, a 1000-year generation starship would need tons of antimatter simply to keep warm.) Note that interstellar hydrogen would impact such a starship at high velocities harder than radiation from a nuclear reactor.
The corollary is that neither fusion energy nor fission energy is sufficient for interstellar propulsion
On the other hand, recent studies apparently hint that things like electrical and gravitational constants may not be the same everywhere, so maybe they don't transmit their signals with light.
One more thing is that the argument that the age of the universe combined with its propensity to make life means there must be some intelligent life can also be applied to the probability that some intelligent life will wake up and save themselves from such a bad fate, as the author hints in the last paragraph. It doesn't mean all species get caught in that trap and never escape, it just means it's harder to become a species that saved itself from the perils of materialism, loss of social justice, and falsehood.
You can also twist it around: if we were the first ones, what would we see?
One can also imagine the window between the dawn of technology and becoming undetectable is short enough the odds of finding a peer are very small.
Therefore, there is no real moral difference between richly populating such virtual worlds (once we can construct them--we can't quite, yet) and populating actual other planets. Nick Bostrom would say that even using the word "actual" is probably wrong, since we're likely living in a simulation already.
There's a simpler (maybe too obvious) answer to the Fermi Paradox: the window of time in which it seems worthwhile to communicate with aliens or to settle the galaxy is exceedingly brief.
But if that concern could be definitively answered--and I think it could--then quite possibly the VR is a good move. Maybe any preference for our outside, non-simulative reality will in time be seen as narrow-minded chauvinism.
Thanks for the book tip. For curious others: The Machine Stops, a story by E. M. Forster: http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
Though somewhat, if the conclusions of the article are correct (I don't think they are), then those who will inherit the earth will be the ones least likely to venture out and make contact.
1) Fermi Paradox
Why haven't we seen any evidence in the observable universe of megascale activities and exponential growth comparable to those that we know that our descendants will be capable of, and fairly soon?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
2) The Outer Bounds of the Possible
Can we convert our entire future light cone into computronium? There seems to be no physical laws to prevent that outcome, and absent being stopped soon, the tiny fraction of our machine descendants to go all out for self-replication and expansion will set this program in motion.
3) The Great Filter
Assuming we're in base reality and everything out there is running much as our present physics understands it to run, are we past the barrier that stops intelligences from converting the observable universe into computronium? Or not?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
4) The Simulation Argument
Or are we simulations, alone in our virtual machine?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis
----
All these are linked via this rather depressing line of thought:
"A technologically mature “posthuman” civilization would have enormous computing power. Based on this empirical fact, the simulation argument shows that at least one of the following propositions is true:
- The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero;
- The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero;
- The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.
If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any relatively wealthy individuals who desire to run ancestor-simulations and are free to do so. If (3) is true, then we almost certainly live in a simulation. In the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion one’s credence roughly evenly between (1), (2), and (3).
Unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation."
----
The bottom line is that there appears to be a large gap in our understanding of the evolution of intelligence in the universe. By all counts, our galaxy should have many civilizations across its span, and by all counts if they're anything like us, their most aggressive descendant factions will turn the whole galaxy into computronium in a few tens of millions of years. But we don't see even the first glimmers of any such thing.
How hilarious would that be if reality was in fact a simulation and the ones watching us get the biggest kick out of everyone trying to figure out why we're here. I guess that assumes that the creators of this simulation have a sense of humor.
http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
They're all down there thinking "why aren't there any alien bacteria sending us some chemical messages already? It's clearly the best way to communicate"
Do you still have a working analog TV set? A shortwave radio?
Also, a huge intelligence gap makes communication uninteresting. e.g. we know a little bit about how ants communicate via pheromones, but we're not trying to send "messages" to them; what would it possibly be useful to say?
So then we'd expect to receive signals from civilizations that are a few million light years away. Yet we don't see those signals.
We're too young a civilization to be spotted by other life forms (as you said, they'd have to be within a 100 light years or so). But when we look at space in any direction it looks dead. Just background radiation.
Sure, we can see a star 1000 light years away, a galaxy 1 billion light years away, and a quasar 10 billion light years away, but a signal from a planet over 1000 light years away? Besides, 1000 light years may not be far enough to cover many planets transmitting. Our galaxy is, what, 100,000 light years across? So, just for our galaxy, might want to think about distances of 50,000 light years or so. The nearest ordinary galaxy is the one in Andromeda, and that's about 1.5 million light years away.
Those are long distances for a radio signal from a planet.
While a popular conjecture in this recurring debate, over the decades we've built up an awful lot of evidence that there really is no better mechanism for distance communication than electromagnetic radiation. We're running out of places for such putatively better mechanisms to hide.
I dislike this line of argument in the modern time, because it conflates two discussions, "what we scientifically know about the universe", and "could conceivable be true even though we have no evidence for our conjectures". While the second may be superficially more fun, it's ultimately a waste of time for any sort of serious discussion because you can hypothesize anything you want. It's content-free, despite the haze of words you can throw up. The first is much more interesting, and while 50 years ago one could still hypothesize better communication mechanisms, I think the argument when used in a serious discussion is out of date. We can name some non-EM communication mechanisms (neutrino beams, for instance), but they all suck horribly by comparison.
Your point is mostly that the stuff we don't know is bad science; I agree.
Still, this thread is to try to answer the question, where is ET?
Historically it would have been better to assume that there was stuff unknown that was better as an explanation than the stuff we did know, going WAY back: The Earth is a ball riding on the back of a turtle? We understood balls and turtles but not gravity of spheres! The earth is a ball held up by Hercules? Similar. To keep the sun moving across the sky we have to pour blood on this special rock? The planets are from wheels rolling in wheels? The stars are light coming through holes in ths sky? The sun is a fire based on coal? The Milky Way is all of the universe? The universe is expanding so there are just three cases, (1) keep expanding but more and more slowly, (2) stop expanding and reach 'steady state', (3) quit expanding and contract into a big crunch. It was ALL wrong! And in all cases the right answer was from things we didn't know yet!
For "We're running out of places for such putatively better mechanisms to hide". Ah, it's always been such! Where was Newton going to look for a solution to the orbit of Mercury? Where was Newton going to look for why he couldn't make gold with chemical reactions? The big bang seems to have things moving faster than the speed of light; where to look? We're not getting the right flow rate of neutrinos from the sun; where to look? Essentially all life on earth is just from DNA; so where to look for the reason there is no other mechanism?
But just now we have at least two biggie places to look: Dark matter and dark energy. About both, we don't have hardly a clue. We are unsure about the Higgs field. We haven't unified gravity. We haven't detected gravitational waves. We're unsure about why galaxies have black holes at their centers. There remain questiona about the 'size' of our universe, especially given the evidence about the flatness of the geometry. We're really mixed up about EPR.
But not all is lost! Some of the new telescopes on the way into orbit are amazing, maybe count the hairs on the back of ETs head! Maybe!
So, why haven't we heard from ET? My guess, stated as just a guess, is that ET communicates by means we don't understand yet. Is this answer solid science? Nope! Might it be correct? Yup! Is there some historical, circumstantial evidence for it? Yup. Are we still in the dark? Yup.
"Dark matter and dark energy."
We aren't as ignorant about them as you might think. For them to be useful for communication would require them to also not have the properties that they appear to have.
This fashionable claiming of extreme ignorance isn't quite as silly as the fashionable affectation of self-species-loathing in this debate, but it's only slightly more sensible...
... of course, part of it is that few people have learned enough math or the relevant science to actually understand just how thoroughly, for instance, FTL really isn't going to happen, or understand enough information theory to understand why communication channels must actually have certain properties to be useful, regardless of their form.
Not really: I'm guessing. Or in more erudite terms, I'm conjecturing.
You seem to be saying that science is what is all wrapped up and solid and that anything else is "science fiction". That's a bit rigid! Also that view would keep us from ever discussing the unknown before it becomes known, and science is a long march through millions of small and dozens of huge cases of the unknown becoming known.
Indeed, if read Einstein's special relativity paper, it reads like conjecture or guessing. That is, when he wrote the paper it was not at all clear that the Lorentz transformation had any physical reality. That paper became accepted as the real physics only later.
There's no solid proof that we can't go faster than light (FTL), and I have much more than enough math and plenty of science to have seen the arguments.
Sure, for any particle with ordinary mass as we know it, as it goes faster through space and approaches light speed, its mass increases and at the speed of light would be infinitely large. Right. So, for that case, FTL would be impossible.
But we don't really know the deeper mechanism for this mass increase. Thus we are like someone in the 18th century saying that travel faster than 60 MPH would be impossible because no horse could move its legs fast enough. That is, once we understand the deeper mechanism that establishes the speed of light speed limit, maybe we could find a way around the mechanism and the limit. The mechanism seems likely connected with the Higgs field, and we don't understand that very well yet.
E.g., we know so little about dark matter we can't be very sure it can't go faster than the speed of light.
For dark energy, we are assuming conservation of energy much as we understand it, estimating the energy of dark energy, assuming that E = mc^2 also applies there, assuming that how matter and energy curve space in general relativity continues to apply, and then concluding the huge mass of dark energy. That's a lot of assumptions from extrapolations. We're assuming that what we see for ordinary matter in accelerators applies to dark energy; that's a GUESS.
So, in science we need to be able to talk about possibilities not yet established. Such "talk" is not the best science, but it's also not "science fiction".
Imagine our current spy agencies with bleeding edge technology spying on the Romans. Its only a two thousand year difference, but there's absolutely no way they could detect our signals and/or equipment (unless we made a serious mistake).
It seems entirely reasonable that another civilization may be tens of thousands of years ahead of us in technological advancement. If you consider the increasing growth rate of technological advancement, its easy to see your explanation.
Why would "nearly every" intelligent civilization have evolved millions of years before ours?
Assume that to get a civilization need a planet and, thus, elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Those heavier elements are created in big stars that supernova, that is, have their cores collapse under gravity and blow off their outer layers where during the explosion all the heavier elements in the periodic table are created by fusing together lighter elements. So to get a planet, have to have a star form, burn out, and supernova. So, assume that are getting candidate planets 3.7 billion years after the big bang. Then have been forming candidate planets for 10 billion years.
Now take the planets that have achieved mastry of radio (i.e., working with photons from 60 Hz up to gamma rays). Take the date when they first made this progress with radio. Take the distribution of those dates over the planets. That distribution is 'concentrated' on the last 10 billion years. Now in that distribution spread out over 10 billion years, what is the probability mass of the last million years? It's TINY. Maybe it's 0.01%. Then 99.99% of the civilizations that mastered radio did it over one million years ago and, thus, are a million years or more ahead of us. Done.
Okay?
It doesn't have to be Dyson spheres either. A large object moving near the speed of light through the interstellar medium would give off one of a few very specific and very strong spectral lines. Now there hasn't been a concerted effort to look for interstellar travelers, but nevertheless in all our years of searching such oddities haven't shown up.
Our nearest other star is 4 light years away. 1000 light years away may still not cover many planets good for ET to colonize. But for us now to see evidence of a colony on a planet 1000 light years away or more would be TOUGH.
Note: The planet hunters mostly don't actually see the planets but just shadows or evidence in star wobbles, etc.
But we are putting up some new telescopes with some astounding resolution, etc.
But as for your list I think you left out the Occam's razor option:
5) Rare earth hypothesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_hypothesis
If it appeared in this galaxy, we'd probably never have evolved.
You might want to re-read that short story. It involved real people and was bootstrapped by very rare real people.
Do you find it a plausible article?
It is simply way way too early for us to assume that there are hard to reach limits to computation. For all we know there could be problems that need to be solved that are not realistically solved using computation or the problems get exponentially more complex faster than their solutions exponentially increase our computing ability or the necessary complexity of the systems increases too quickly to manage.
(no, waving a "true AI" magic wand doesn't make these disappear, it buries them in another layer of conjecture)
We can't even solve the damned P vs NP problem yet!
> Can we convert our entire future
> light cone into computronium? There
> seems to be no physical laws to prevent
> that outcome
Let me rephrase that in a more scientific way: No one has disproved that this is impossible. It's a bit of cheat to phrase it this way when we don't even know what those physical laws would look like so have no idea of whether or not we know of any laws that would prevent that outcome.
There is only one definitely true thing about these types of predictions, they are interesting, inspiring, necessary and a few generations from now they will be looked at the same way we look at the rocket pack/floating city/flying car predictions of previous generations (which is the same way they looked at the previous futurist predictions and so on)
Remember that we're talking about timescales of millions of years here.
My point was that first you would have to define what computronium actually is before you can comment on what physical laws apply. It might also be useful to wait until we understand the physical laws that would apply at that scale, which we don't.
There are no physical laws that make rocket packs or flying cities impossible either, we just discovered that some aspects are either impractical or we just found a better solution to the same problems.
I don't want to sound like I think these kinds of thought experiments are in any way bad, I love them.
The best case scenario is that our thought experiments now are like davinci's helicopters. Ridiculous because of our ignorance of the natural world but still extraordinarily clever and farsighted. A more likely case is that they are downright stupid because of that same ignorance.
The opinion that an idea we've had or could understand is anything like what construction projects with timescales of millions of years will look like is the silliest kind of hubris. Especially when you start arguing over physical laws of imaginary vaguely defined substances.
Really? You know the future? Citation needed, at the very least.
Merry Christmas.
But it lacks the appreciation of how interesting the depressing observation is.
Weltschmerzfreude seems like it's just a contradiction (also I know almost no german at all so it's likely just gibberish) but it doesn't sound bad.
Something along similar lines:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/257096/crap-is-everyth...
Let's imagine there are far more planets like ours that have life - let's throw intelligence out, because that is defined by some relative standard - which has not yet reached that capability. Why would we be interesting in the scope of these far more advanced extraterrestrial societies?
Perhaps they don't reach out because it would be as fruitless as us trying to communicate with ants. Perhaps they don't care to study us because we seem about as interesting as primordial soup (ie. a nuclear holocaust might be a trait of that). Perhaps intelligences like ours are well understood, well classified in the genus of the universe, and we are about as ordinary as a barnacle on the hull of a tug boat.
It may be electromagnetic leakage or Dyson spheres or any of a number of other signs of artifice.
If the "we're like ants/barnacles to them" theory is true, then they wouldn't bother intentionally hiding from us, because we're no threat to them. If they do it unintentionally, that would still be interesting: for example, it would probably mean that civilizations do not in fact aggressively colonize the galaxy.
Perhaps without FTL drive, it takes what explorers there might be a long time between (expensive!) visits, so sightings are rare. Without FTL, and without some kind of cold-sleep, a journey to the nearest stars pretty much takes a lifetime. A few would go, but not many.
It's too late (bedtime) for me to slap "Drake's equation" type numbers on this, but hopefully you get the idea. Maybe we've not seen anybody because they only visit any given planet every million years or so, and "they" equals 2 or 3 species local enough to even bother with that paltry schedule.
I'm not saying there is anybody out there, just that lacking pure freaking magic technology, it's a hell of a trip to make if they were. OTOH, if there is an outpost 100 light-years away, expect a visit in another 100 to 1000 years???
Any species that didn't have intellectual curiosity about things that aren't obvious useful would probably never make it off its home planet. A lot of the math and science that underlies stuff we use every day didn't seem useful when it was developed - see, for example, the theory of computation, worked out when there were no computers, and without which there probably still wouldn't be any computers.
Oddly enough, I think its an optimistic outcome if we play video games and never meet aliens in that if they function like us, it will be either us exploiting them or them exploiting us unless we amazingly are right on par with each other. Sorry to be so pessimistic, its just that we have consistently failed pretty hard as a race in how we treat other creatures and the environment.
Basically he purposes that there is either a barrier somewhere before our point of biological progress or after; as he explains in the video, the desired reality is that we have already surpassed that barrier. He reasons that space travel is a simple engineering challenge compared to evolving intelligent life on the cosmological scale, so there's less reason to believe the barrier lies after our point of progress.
The technology-enslavement theory is bunk because humans pretty much tend to self-correct over time. We start destroying the environment, somebody notices, we start pulling back on our rampant destruction enough to keep things operating. An epidemic of fat kids goes on, people start complaining, and schools begin the process of sort-of making their lunches healthier. If it got so bad that we almost destroy ourselves from too much internet use somebody would start complaining and we'd reign back on that too.
Probably the real reason we haven't met any is that they probably have agreements that they don't come down and show themselves to new planets until the new planet's peoples advance their space technology to an appropriate level; ours is still kind of dark-ages technology. Maybe after the military invests we can have a nice big boom in space travel.
> somebody notices, we start pulling back
> on our rampant destruction enough to keep
> things operating
We did? That's great news. It must be recent though, so far i've only heard a lot of talk and a few useless feel good activities for guilty first worlders to distract themselves with like recycling their pop cans.
As far as self correction goes, the only thing any species has proved to be good at long term is going extinct.
That covers the types of pollution and over-consumption that are a visible and immediate threat, like dumping toxic waste in rivers and highly toxic air pollution.
There has been no serious willingness to address the issues of the increase in per-captia consumption of finite resources.
I was really taking issue with the statement that humans will be the first species that does not reproduce and consume as much as it possibly can before partial or complete extinction. That somehow humans will naturally reign in their natural impulses before it becomes too dangerous. That statement is based on zero evidence. We think we are the exception, humans are good at that, individually and collectively. Here's hoping.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Stink
(Check out the cartoon of Faraday!)
The universe is a big place. There are probably trillions of habitable planets. We're just not that special. Maybe one day, if we somehow become "worth it", they'll stop by.