The Fermi Paradox -- Where is everybody?

mkopec said:

You could take that even further with gene splicing and DNA makeovers so that you can pretty much make the perfect human for whatever planetoid they are going to. You could even engineer some to help survive space flight. For instance legs are useless in space, why not engineer 4 arms? etc...

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I draw the line at redhead neanderthals tho.

mkopec said:

You could take that even further with gene splicing and DNA makeovers so that you can pretty much make the perfect human for whatever planetoid they are going to. You could even engineer some to help survive space flight. For instance legs are useless in space, why not engineer 4 arms? etc...

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Scalzi's Old Man's War series has a fun take on these ideas.

mkopec said:

once we find out how to do this shit, its game on....

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With a programmatic understanding of DNA the future is going to become unrecognizably weird very fast.

mkopec said:

I was watching one fo those sci channel space shows and they proposed this idea. Engineering the perfect humans for space travel. Dont think it will be impossible because once we find out how to do this shit, its game on....

Kind of like that show, I forgot which, but they engineered space miners for some planet they were mining, and they were perfect for that job/planet but they struggled here on earth.

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The Expanse?

Cad said:

This series was ruined for me by Scalzi coming out as a completely deranged SJW

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Ahh. That's a shame.

I've been around enough that I make a point of not following the real-world personas of anyone who makes art I enjoy.

Only the really shitty ones NEED to use their politics to sell their books. In Faulkner's day a "potboiler" would involve writing about helpless college girls getting ensnared into prostitution. Today it's fucking virtue signalling that gets people to donate to your patreon. Steven King is about as rabid an SJW as they come and he's never had to resort to that to pay the bills.

I liked Old Man's War though. I think I'm missing the last few books.

mkopec said:

I was watching one fo those sci channel space shows and they proposed this idea. Engineering the perfect humans for space travel. Dont think it will be impossible because once we find out how to do this shit, its game on....

Kind of like that show, I forgot which, but they engineered space miners for some planet they were mining, and they were perfect for that job/planet but they struggled here on earth.

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They weren't engineered, they just had generations reared and raised in low gravity. Pilot episode of The Expanse tried to show the effects on Belters (elongated bodies, pale, hard for them to function in 1G), although for practical reasons they really couldn't carry that depiction for the entire show.

I dunno. Because of the set point is high enough you would still see them.

Maybe we do see them. Maybe those dark matter clouds surrounding galaxies are contortions of a geometry we don't get understand. If you want computational effeciency, you want to avoid heat. And that must be true no matter what computational medium you're using.

Galaxies are hot.

iannis said:

Maybe we do see them. Maybe those dark matter clouds surrounding galaxies are contortions of a geometry we don't get understand. If you want computational effeciency, you want to avoid heat. And that must be true no matter what computational medium you're using.

Galaxies are hot.

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But computational matter would STILL be hot. At minimum it would hotter than inert gases in intergalactic space, but if it's the computational substrate of an advanced civilization it would be hot enough to stick out like a sore thumb. The denser and more efficient the computation the hotter it gets. In fact, computational matter at the densities a Kardashev-2 civilization would be able to produce would be almost as hot as the near orbit of Mercury. It's why they'd need to be layered in Matrioshka Brains to optimize energy efficiency.

If there are clouds of computational matter outside galaxies they would still stick out in infrared unless they're not running any computations at all.

khorum said:

If there are clouds of computational matter outside galaxies they would still stick out in infrared unless they're not running any computations at all.

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On some scale yes, but perhaps not detectable by us now. (Yes, that puts us right back in the Fermi Paradox.)

pharmakos said:

Why?

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Yeah I have no idea why the prospect that civilizations who "Found peace with entropy and embraced nature" is somehow distinct from civilizations that were asphyxiated by a clathrate gun that kills most of the species on the planet or alien dinosaurs that go extinct because of a meteor strike.

Unless a civilization emerges to escape the Malthusian trap on its planet, entropy guarantees something will come along to kill most life on it. Each epoch could enjoy hundreds of millions of years of relative equilibrium where the population on the planet is closely regulated by its available energy. But eventually SOMETHING will wipe it all out unless they expand to exploit more energy resources.

Even if we advanced to a K-1civilization, ended war, shot down every asteroid and spent the next 1 billion years patting ourselves in the back, the Sun will expand and render us extinct unless we leave first.

So if there's some social phenomenon that impairs advanced civilizations from expanding to the full extent of their capabilities, why wouldn't that resolve the Fermi Paradox? Every other factor tells us the Milky Way would be fully colonized by the first species that achieved spaceflight A HUNDRED TIMES OVER since the galaxy cooled enough to meet the Drake Equation's factor for the rate of habitable star formation. So if the only thing that has kept the Galaxy as sterile as we observe is some cultural or social impediment, then THAT would answer Fermi's question.

khorum said:

Yeah I have no idea why the prospect that civilizations who "Found peace with entropy and embraced nature" is somehow distinct from civilizations that were asphyxiated by a clathrate gun that kills most of the species on the planet or alien dinosaurs that go extinct because of a meteor strike.

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Because one of them was killed suddenly and unexpectedly, and that's a very different series of events to experience. If all you care about is the logical constraints of Fermi's Paradox, it's not that different.

Captain Suave said:

Because one of them was killed suddenly and unexpectedly.

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LOL so the one who had more time to contemplate extinction is somehow LESS extinct? If they successfully sent seedships out to other stars they would NOT be extinct. A graceful death is no less dead than a sudden one.

khorum said:

If they successfully sent seedships out to other stars they would NOT be extinct.

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Who said they didn't? (Hypothetically. I know we don't see current evidence of that.) Entropy kills everything eventually no matter what scale you achieve.

Are you really saying that there's no difference between a multi-trillion year culture that's eventually killed by the expansion of space itself compared to a single-planet species vaporized by a meteor after a few hundred years?

khorum said:

A graceful death is no less dead than a sudden one.

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Having myself literally held the hand of a person as they died, there's sure as fuck an important experiential difference.

Captain Suave said:

Who said they didn't? (Hypothetically. I know we don't see current evidence of that.) Entropy kills everything eventually no matter what scale you achieve.

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Because if they did even as recently as 5-50 million years ago, we would see evidence of their civilization everywhere in the Milky Way, unless some socio-political or cultural compulsion reconfigures their resource distribution in such a way that those colonization efforts are half-hearted or doomed to fail, in which case THAT would resolve the Fermi Paradox.

If some sort of civilization-wide Surrender to Entropy is what's kept the Milky Way from being stuffed full of intelligent life then that would be a logical answer to Fermi's question. Why wouldn't it?