The Fermi Paradox -- Where is everybody?

If a species evolved technologically to a point where sexual reproduction and population growth became unnecessary, what would be the purpose of expanding outward from its own solar system other than to avoid catastrophe?

Is it possible that there’s a civilization out there of 10 billion, for all intents and purposes, technologically immortal beings sustaining themselves on the energy of a single sun? Their technological focus being to more efficiently utilize the energy readily available, rather than expand outward? What if that catastrophe has thus far been rare (star death) or able to be mitigated (comet, stellar phenomenon) so expansion/migration is rarely necessary (once in a billion+ years)?

Is it feasible that there are extremely advanced civilizations that are simply too low profile to notice?

khorum said:

Then they'd encase all the remaining supermassive black holes with shkadov engines

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Made of what, since atoms have evaporated due to the expansion of space?

"the Big Rip is a hypothetical cosmological model concerning the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the matter of the universe, from stars and galaxies to atoms and subatomic particles, and even spacetime itself, is progressively torn apart by the expansion of the universe"

Quaid said:

If a species evolved technologically to a point where sexual reproduction and population growth became unnecessary, what would be the purpose of expanding outward from its own solar system other than to avoid catastrophe?

Is it possible that there’s a civilization out there of 10 billion, for all intents and purposes, technologically immortal beings sustaining themselves on the energy of a single sun? Their technological focus being to more efficiently utilize the energy readily available, rather than expand outward? What if that catastrophe has thus far been rare (star death) or able to be mitigated (comet, stellar phenomenon) so expansion is rarely necessary (once in a billion+ years)?

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They'd expand to avoid catastrophe because no there's no such thing as a truly closed system. In their case the most pressing catastrophe would be their sun running out of hydrogen fuel and expanding to consume everything in the system before going supernova.

If they can build a Dyson Sphere then they can easily design it so that they can open apertures in the shell so that one hemisphere of the shell can be open, creating a Shkadov engine. This way they move the entire solar sytem, ditch the star and pick up a new star.

But if they're already post-physical then they can already send tiny seedships with just a couple bootstrap intelligence in something about the size of a beer can. They'd be able to afford sending millions of these at distant stars so that by the time their old solar system in near enough the new dyson shell would be finished.

Captain Suave said:

Made of what, since atoms have evaporated due to the expansion of space?

"the Big Rip is a hypothetical cosmological model concerning the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the matter of the universe, from stars and galaxies to atoms and subatomic particles, and even spacetime itself, is progressively torn apart by the expansion of the universe"

Big Rip - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Yeah, thanks, I'm well aware of the Big Rip.

They'd have to prepare for it long before aestivation. In fact they'd have to start before dark energy and Hubble's law pushes all the nearby galaxies further apart than the speed of light. The longer it takes for them to merge galaxies, the less energy and matter will be available to them since the further galaxies will become unreachable with our known physics. The more galaxies they can capture the more energy they'll have for the final simulation and the more time they'll have inside.

Michio Kaku puts the time window to capture as many galaxies as they can at around 50 billion years. After that the other galaxies will be out of reach with the physics that we know.

khorum said:

Yeah, thanks, I'm well aware of the Big Rip.

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Ok, so we're in agreement that there's an ultimate endpoint on survival no matter what you do, barring new physics? The substrate is going to vanish at a finite point in time unless they discover a way to modify the cosmological constant.

Captain Suave said:

Ok, so we're in agreement that there's an ultimate endpoint on survival no matter what you do, barring new physics? The substrate is going to vanish a finite point in time unless they discover a way to modify the cosmological constant.

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No I don't agree. If the filter is behind us (which it may not be), there's no reason to assume that future civilizations won't pursue every last avenue of survival before the furthest galaxies spread too far out of reach. If they can merge just a few thousand supermassives it would still power a computing substrate so powerful that the time outside that final simulation will be subjectively frozen to them.

If you're willing to entertain THAT possibility, which isn't prohibited by any physics we know, then why couldn't you entertain the possibility that entities so motivated to get that far would be equally motivated to spend trillions of subjective years finding something beyond our current understanding of physics that would approximate survival. If they just spend all that time fapping to hentai then yeah, fuck them, they deserve it.

The Big Rip is just one of the possible models of the end-state of the universe too. Until recently the Big Crunch was more prominent, which would allow our descendants to concentrate virtually all the remaining energy of the universe towards the final simulation. If it's the Big Rip they'd only have about 50 billion years to gather as many galaxies as possible....so it's like climate change but with the death of the universe.

khorum said:

If they can merge just a few thousand supermassives it would still power a computing substrate so powerful that the time will be subjectively frozen to them.

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Do you have a handy source on this I can read? Some cursory googling isn't coming up with much. Plenty of theory that sufficiently large black holes experience subjective time stop, but this probably isn't what you're talking about since simulations require time to do anything.

Captain Suave said:

Do you have a handy source on this I can read? Some cursory googling isn't coming up with much. Plenty of theory that sufficiently large black holes experience subjective time stop, but this probably isn't what you're talking about since simulations require time to do anything.

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For which? The computational advantages of aestivating until the universe is cooler is here.

paper said:

A comparison of current computational resources to late era computational resources hence suggest a potential multiplier of 10^30! Even if only the resources available in a galactic supercluster are exploited, later-era exploitation produces a payoff far greater than any attempt to colonize the rest of the accessible universe and use the resources early. In fact, the massenergy of just the Earth itself (5.9 · 1024 kg) would be more than enough to power more computations than could currently be done by burning the present observable universe! (6 · 1052 kg)5 In practice the efficiency will be lower but the multiplier tends to remain astronomical.

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There was a paper that critiqued that multiplier, but their assertions about optimizing energy and matter in a cooler universe is sound. They didn't make any assumptions about which end-state the universe would arrive but even a relatively early "wake-up" period in a Big Rip scenario would be tremendous.

As for using black holes for energy or propulsion that should be all over the place. There's a few calculators online to figure out the circumstances under which a black hole would start evaporating. The black hole mergers would be tremendously energetic too. In fact the energy from the black hole merger that caused the gravity wave that LIGO detected was one of the most energetic things ever recorded.

khorum said:

The computational advantages of aestivating until the universe is cooler is here.

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Thanks. Is your claim basically that 10^bignumber computations (or whatever large amount you end up with from aestivating) is functionally close enough to infinite for a simulated intelligence? There wasn't a discussion in that paper of subjective time freezing with that label attached to it.

(At risk of further nit-picking, that paper is full of qualifiers that aestivation would cease well before galactic evaporation, never mind atomic evaporation, and it didn't imply at all that anything would survive a Big Rip. "... there will always be a finite cost to irreversible computations: without infinite resources only a finite number of such computations can be done in the future of any civilization.")

For clarity, here's the line of yours I was curious about:

khorum said:

it would still power a computing substrate so powerful that the time will be subjectively frozen to them.

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I want to understand the differences you intend of between actually infinite and "just" very extended simulated lifespans. I'm also a little unclear why frozen subjective time would be a good thing, since presumably there is no associated experience.

Captain Suave said:

Thanks. Is your point basically that 10^25 computations (or whatever large amount you end up with from aestivating) is functionally close enough to infinite for a simulated intelligence?

(At risk of further nit-picking, that paper is full of qualifiers that aestivation would cease well before galactic, never mind atomic, evaporation.)

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Well that's just the multiplier that reflects the computational advantage in executing the computation in a cooler universe versus today. Subjectively they experience anywhere from really reaaaaally slowed real time to something close enough so as to be indistinguishable from Tipler's notional "Subjective Immortality" at his proposed Omega Point. (Don't bother googling it, he's a weird Jesus freak from MIT). Still, it wouldn't be the weirdest outcome in that scenario.

As far as the aestivation guys yeah, depending on which physical eschatology they will have observed, they'd either have 50 billion years to capture as many galaxies as they can before the Big Rip pushes the other galaxies away from them faster than the speed of light or a LOT more time in the case of the Big Crunch where they got a few trillion years to pretty much just colonize every galaxy and start pushing them together whenever.

ZyyzYzzy said:

Man. Armchair rocket scientist are worse than armchair generals

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Only people with unhealthy amounts of free time think about this. I know legit rocket scientists (cousin at SpaceX) and a couple astronomers. They're much too busy with problems like "I need more thrust without melting this rocket engine" and "The Hawaiian holy men just vetoed the site for my new telescope".

Captain Suave said:

I want to understand the differences you intend of between actually infinite and "just" very extended simulated lifespans.

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Something along Michio Kaku's point in that video or maybe even as far as actual subjective immortality. I don't want to speculate on what Kaku says, or whether they'd achieve ACTUAL subjective immortality, but if they've made it that far, they have the time to resolve a means to survive beyond that state or reverse it or induce another big bang or whatever.

Cunts are whining about the derail as it is, but the only reason it's gotten derailed this far is because the notion that surrendering to entropy as the "best case scenario" is NOT true and will not be true since not every avenue towards survival has been exhausted, even with our current understanding of physics.

I still think the Malthusian Trap is still a more plausible resolution to the Fermi Paradox, but civilizations that abandon infinite exploitation and expansion __ARE__ failures, whether they go nobly or die screaming.

I somehow had missed this thread until now but thought I'd chime in that I led a firstyear seminar** on this a few years back that was full of similar theorycrafting and general pondering. Many students said it was the best class they had that year, although some said it was by far the most depressing. When I allow myself the luxury to think cosmological it never fails to boggle the mind that we are either alone or being ghosted.



**Would have loved to have done it again but some redneck got butthurt and said the very ideas of the seminar was hurting their supposedly all-powerful deity. Since it was mostly a fluff firstyear thing there was no point in fighting back against stupid and so we dropped the whole thing.

Muurloen said:

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One of the coolest uses of the anthropic principle as a resolution to the Fermi Paradox is that since the universe seems so perfect for us means that we're the first, the last and the only species to rise to intelligence and are destined to colonize the whole universe. Basically, the only way this CANNOT be true is if is we accept that retrocausality never propagates beyond quantum scales; IE: the only way it cannot happen is if the means to manipulate the past is NEVER invented in the trillions upon trillions of years in the future.

Because the first species to achieve that must use it to SHAPE an anthropic universe for their ancestors with the optimal outcomes to guarantee their own survival, or even their existence, in the far future. So the reason we see the universe just the way it is, sterile with no signs of other competing species, is because our descendants made it so.

Someone from the Fermi Natl Labs has been trolling this thread. It's got shkadov engines and galactic harvesting and everything.

MIT Tech Review said:

An advanced civilization could resist the accelerating expansion of the universe
the question that Hooper investigates is whether there is anything an advanced civilization can do to mitigate the effects of this accelerating expansion. And it turns out there is.

His idea is that an advanced civilization could build a sphere that emits waste radiation in a specific direction. This radiation would accelerate the sphere—and the star it contains—in the opposite direction.

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The paper is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.05203.pdf