The Fermi Paradox -- Where is everybody?

Sentagur said:

So pretty much every use scenario that revolves around leaving Sol.

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The max exhaust velocity of a current ion thruster tech is ~50 km/s. Solar escape velocity is ~42 km/s. We can already do it, albeit not by a huge margin.

Plus you can use gravity slingshots like we did with Voyager 1, which has already exited the solar system.

Cad said:

I think what they're postulating is sending AI ships with numbers of human embryos that would be unfrozen and grown once the AI ship lands and establishes base camp.

The AI being able to do all this completely autonomously considering it would be years (perhaps tens of years) round trip communication time seems pretty ambitious. You'd need some pretty solid advancements in AI.

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Do we, today, have the technology to freeze human embryos for dozens of years and then via machine successfully bring them back and to gestation? My understanding is we have only come close with other things (eg sheep), even if admittedly it's the fault of philosophically-motivated regulations.

I am looking for a solution to us seeding the galaxy, without not-invented tech.

yerm said:

Do we, today, have the technology... I am looking for a solution to us seeding the galaxy, without not-invented tech.

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No, we won't be doing this in the next ~50 years at the very least unless some major new breakthroughs occur.

yerm said:

How does this translate into colonising anything, given current (nevermind 1969) levels of technology? What exactly are we sending across the universe that will result in humanity's conscious existence outside the solar system? I keep hearing seed ships or AI etc. What is any of this doing exactly? Are we hurling earthborne organic matter hoping for eventual evolution? Are we content to merely send digital recordings of humanity without means of replicating organic human life (or really any propogation of the species) and calling it a win?

I am not looking for some hypothetical to-be-invented tech, even if I personally think for sure it's coming. I want modern tech. Real existing proven cause we have it today no further innovation needed tech. Assume cost is no barrier here. Do we have what is needed to put, recreate, breed, clone, grow, or in any otherwise way end up with living humans existing on extra-solar celestial bodies?

Tldr - assume propulsion is a given, cost is no issue, but must use only currently-invented/discovered tech. Can we seed the galaxy/ies? How?

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The whole point about "1969 technology" is that the means to achieve that velocity has existed for decades and we can reasonably assume that some species can arrive at the same conclusions WE did about rocket technology that's over a thousand years old. Cuz remember, rockets aren't "1969 technology", they're "969 technology" since that's when some chinese guy invented them. We've just been spending a thousand years refining them.

So we would send these rockets out with cheap technology, some frozen human embryos and some self-replicating robots. Many, if not most of these seedships will either fail or hit a pebble on the way to the destination. A lot of shit can happen because it's gonna take about 100,000 years to get there. So we want to launch hundreds if not thousands for each target star.

Once they get there the robots will send versions of itself to the planet's surface and either start building the habitats or terraform a local region of the planet. If they need to terraform the planet first they'll try to do that. If they need to seed the atmosphere with tailored organisms to slowly convert its composition they could do that.

It could take a couple hundred years or a few thousand, it won't matter cuz they're self-replicating robots and all they have to do is keep the embryos nice and viable and unlike interstellar space they won't bloom into small supernovas if they fly into a helium atom. Once the habitats are ready and there's a self-sustaining agricultural base for the first generation of colonists they'd bring some embryos down, gestate them in artificial wombs, and build some kinda nanny-bot we programmed to raise them as fine Americans. They'd keep doing this until the colony is well situated and has produced enough of an industrial base to launch seedships of its own. That might take another couple hundred years. In that study, they threw in an extra 500 for the daughter colonies to be able to send their own seedships too.

I'd personally save a few robots and embryos in orbit in case some asshole snuck in an SJW bot in there and we need to start over.

Cad said:

We can't even trust other humans to preserve our culture. These people would be struggling up out of the stone age, every time.

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Culture? LOL they won't even LOOK LIKE us after a few generations. Trappist-1D is one of the best candidates in a star's habitable zone and that has half the Earth gravity. If the colonists somehow adapt to deal with the bone loss and other effects, they'd speciate from us soon enough.

We're only 500,000 years from when we speciated from some upright monkey. In the 5 million years it would take expansion to fill the Milky Way at the most aggressive space, we could've speciated TEN MORE variants of Homo Erectus in the exact same planet.

Cad said:

I for one look forward to banging some really skinny half-gravity space hotties

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Good point, some of us descended from thirsty neanderthal-chasers. Life finds a way.

AngryGerbil said:

Reaching further, I think I agree with the dictum that 'benevolent dictatorship' is the best form of government. It pains me a bit to say it, but I can admit it to myself.

But there is a major problem with that. Although I'd like to think that I would be happy underneath the dictatorship of Augustus or Aurelius or Elizabeth or Victoria, all of them must face the problem of succession. And when heredity is involved, for every Elizabeth, we get 20 Georges. For every Catherine, we get 20 Ivans.

On the flip side, Democracy and Republicanism share a similar problem. For every Lincoln, we get 20 Clintons.

In the longer run, I DO think that Republicanism is the better form of government. It might not always produce the best results but it will more consistently produce better results than will dictatorship because of the biological reasons I've mentioned.

Of course Republicanism produces an incipient and corrupt Political Class (Clintons, Kennedys, Bushes) that cannot be ignored. But I just can't see how we can do better. I'm all ears, but it's not immediately evident to me.

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Yeah, its why dictatorship overall is a poor form of government.

In the end, the saying "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" is actually..not true. Its right enough that we regard as true, and we act as if its true--but its not technically true. The reality is what power does is allow corruption or malice or greed to be expressed to its absolute fullest. It also allows incompetence, or naivety to be expressed to its fullest. What power does is, in short, is magnify the traits someone already posses. If you're a greed, mean person, you will be a cleptocrat that tortures people. If you're cunning, paranoid but not extremely intelligent, you'll be Mao or Stalin. A leader with almost perfect traits will be amazing, because he was amazing before he became powerful. But any flaw will be magnified to the point that it can destroy everything (And this doesn't even require a truly negative trait, the constraints of power make it so that simply not being able to be almost super-humanly methodical in your attention to detail can lead even good people into a spiral).

So yeah. If you get lucky, its an amazing form of leadership. But based on bell curves of traits, if having a dictator were like playing Russian roulette, 4 out of 6 chambers would be loaded. And you only need ONE bad one to end the game, permanently. Natural human variation genetically ensures eventually a dictator will be put into power who will be awful. Until we can predict traits and fine tune test to see how those traits have expressed due to environmental changes--dictators will be worse than Republics. Our predictive ability just isn't capable of making that system good (And once it is...we probably won't need that kind of leadership anymore, as superhuman data organization/transfer will preclude a lot of need for leaders at all, or require systems that essentially control all thought so some peon doesn't genetically engineer super viruses to wipe out humanity because he's bored.).

Sentagur said:

You want to send thousands out there with minimal chances of actual success as well. And you want to trust their upbringing and education to an AI the likes of Microsoft Tay?

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I mean, there IS extant technology to mitigate that... and not just with a legion of advanced Tay-chan Nanny-bots: CRISPR exists and we know the genetic markers for personality determination.

If you want to get into some serious "philosophical complications" wait till you get a load of my hyper-disciplined, perfectly organized and unfailingly obedient first wave of colonists. Then follow them up with hardy, super-diligent and dependable laborers. And then finally gestate some high-openness creative types.

If you can decide what embryos go into the seedships, why would you bring addicts, muslims or SJWs?

Yeah it's not optimal. But it's almost certainly gonna happen....if only because it will probably happen ON EARTH first, long before we send any seedships out.

I mean, why bother with the expenditure of a massive totalitarian police state to mitigate the risks in the Vulnerable World Hypothesis when you already have a problem with low population growth and widespread restlessness from your police-state antics?

You could just kill two birds with one stone and eliminate the NEED for a police state and alleviate those acute population shortages at the same time by engineering obedient and productive citizens who are born with a serious fetish for the state.