The Fermi Paradox -- Where is everybody?

khorum said:

we don't need to indulge in the hypotheticals to understand the NEED for any civilization to organize around maximizing energy and expanding to secure more of it. Everything from cellular structures to galaxies are governed by the same laws of thermoeconomics.

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But surely there are competing drivers, like "space is fucking huge and it's a pain in the ass to get to the next star" and "dyson spheres are goddamn hard to build". I don't find it implausible that at a certain point an intelligence could decide that physical expansion isn't worth it and looked for alternative routes growth. If you had a finite number of near-immortal AIs living in virtual utopias powered by a trillion-year store of fissionable material then affecting big changes in the physical world might seem less appealing.

Captain Suave said:

But surely there are competing drivers, like "space is fucking huge and it's a pain in the ass to get to the next star" and "dyson spheres are goddamn hard to build". I don't find it implausible that at a certain point an intelligence could decide that physical expansion isn't worth it and looked for alternative routes growth. If you had a finite number of near-immortal AIs living in virtual utopias powered by a trillion-year store of fissionable material then affecting big changes in the physical world might seem less appealing.

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As for "dyson spheres are hard to build" that's the the Malthusian end-point again. Basically that proposition says that civilizations would be overcome by the pressure to equalize energy distribution across all its constituents and eventually become unable to expand beyond their homeworld before dwindling resources or external events wiped them out. It's the Orwellian 1984 world---when every wolf gets to vote we eventually run out of the sort of lambs we need to get us off the planet. That's an anthropomorhic expression of it, but Malthusian equilibrium is based on the second law of thermodynamics expanded to social and economic applications. So Dinosaurs or intelligent mushrooms would have to contend with it regardless where they are.

As far as "it's a pain int he ass to get to the next star" once again, Hair/Hedman's paper showed that it's ONLY a pain in the ass if you're considering the question in the context of human lifetimes. Any civilization who could produce the delta v we could muster in 1969 could have colonized the ENTIRE GALAXY in 5-50 million years. Some alien civilization who built space kites with their embryos or intelligent trees or something could've colonized their entire volume traversed by our electronic emissions so far in about 180,000 years...which isn't much considering it would take Voyager 1 77,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri. We don't need warpdrives or Guild Navigators to fold space. We just need to launch seed ships full of frozen embryos and AI to build the colonies and to raise the colonists to live on them.

That's nothing in cosmic timescales and it's less than half the lifetime of the oldest organism on Earth, but it only SEEMS vast to humans. Even human societies behave more or less along the path towards resource maximalization, and thus act far beyond the scope of single lifetimes.

khorum said:

that's the the Malthusian end-point again... Basically that proposition says that civilizations would be overcome by the pressure to equalize energy distribution across all its constituents and eventually become unable to expand beyond their homeworld before dwindling resources or external events wiped them out.

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That's not the scenario I had in mind, although in retrospect I stated it poorly and your read is fair.

IMO, many of these arguments that we should see solar system-level construction projects everywhere conflate possibility with desirability. I'm not arguing an alien race would be unable to achieve these things, rather that they might not want to because at a certain point of development that kind of expansion stops being interesting or usefully rewarding. I don't think there's anything anthropocentric about that.

For an advanced civilization which had systematized their ability to fully meet their basic needs, I would think the most precious resource would be consciousness-hours in a lifespan. Machines think faster than meat, which is one big incentive to change the hardware. Computers also don't have built-in expiration dates and you reduce health/lifespan issues to energy supply and hardware replacement. Once you convert to a fully synthetic form of life, I don't think it's obvious that the same imperatives for expansion hold they way they do for biological organisms in competitive environments.

One hallmark of intelligence is the awareness and foresight to abstain from or defer action. Every action requires effort and gets a return, and where the return isn't worth investment you choose not to do it. If you've upgraded your species to immortal AI, why procreate? If you've locked in virtual utopia and have enough fissionable mass to power it until protons evaporate, why bother with travel or dyson spheres?

Captain Suave said:

My personal theory is that intelligent species pretty quickly figure out that space is really fucking big, physical travel is hard, slow, and low-reward, and sacks of meat are resource-intensive and unreliable substrates for long-lived intelligence. They evolve/invent/transfer themselves onto more robust machine hardware and then sit around in super-efficient server farms on asteroids in the middle of nowhere living in whatever kind of virtual utopia they can dream up and have zero interest interacting with other species. We don't see them because why would they bother making themselves seen?

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Yeah, from humanity's point of view...if we want to experience Star Trek, well, just create a virtual reality that DOES allow you to zip across the galaxy like in the show. Sure it's not real, but the sense of amazement and wonder will still be the same.

All I know is, that if we ever do get into interstellar travel and start colonizing other planets, in all likelihood the evil invaders in all the movies killing all the inhabitants will be us.

All those poor Na'vi!

Harkon said:

All I know is, that if we ever do get into interstellar travel and start colonizing other planets, in all likelihood the evil invaders in all the movies killing all the inhabitants will be us.

All those poor Na'vi!

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khorum said:

That's nothing in cosmic timescales and it's less than half the lifetime of the oldest organism on Earth, but it only SEEMS vast to humans. Even human societies behave more or less along the path towards resource maximalization, and thus act far beyond the scope of single lifetimes.

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Who exactly will be making these 100,000-year plans if not humans? Most of us have ridiculously short time horizons. We are REALLY bad at delaying immeadiate gratification for potential future gain. Planning for retirement is the most far-reaching thing most humans will ever even consider, and how does that go for everyone? And most organizational/governmental time scales are ironically far shorter than that. You might think that we would overcome that, but do you think the average American's time horizon has increased or decresed over the last 100 years?

These scenarios assume future us will be WAY better at everything than current us. If future us continues to advance, we'll have surely better tech, but why assume that we'll have the will to spend a huge amount of resources today on massive gambles that will only have a chance to pay off thousands of years after we're dead? Imagine an Egyptian pharoah thinking, "well, I was going to build this awesome-ass pyramid, but instead, lets plant this seed that will help FOHers shitpost in a few thousand years!"

Even if our tech improves in almost unimaginable ways, it will still be humans making the decisions. And we want stuff now. And wanting stuff now does not mesh with really long trips. We stood on the moon before most of us were born, and we haven't even been to Mars yet (and arguably, can't even go back to the moon at the moment). The great colonizers indeed!

The great filter is us.

We've had nuclear power for less than 100 years without managing to hit the reset button on modern society, albeit with a few close calls. All of this is predicated on our tech advancing, but the ease with which destruction can be brough about naturally follows. Most countries could have nukes now, if we would let them. How long until it's easy enough that we can't stop them? How long until someone really builds a cobolt boat? A sufficiently motivated billionaire might be able to push the reset button today (arguably, that's being attempted right now). How long until randos can start CRISPRing plagues in their basement?

I don't think that's as pessimistic as it sounds though. I think there's a pretty high chance that the next hundred or two years will be really amazing. 50 million though? On galactic time scales, there's just too much that can go wrong.

Captain Suave said:

That's not the scenario I had in mind, although in retrospect I stated it poorly and your read is fair.

IMO, many of these arguments that we should see solar system-level construction projects everywhere conflate possibility with desirability. I'm not arguing an alien race would be unable to achieve these things, rather that they might not want to because at a certain point of development that kind of expansion stops being interesting or usefully rewarding. I don't think there's anything anthropocentric about that.

For an advanced civilization which had systematized their ability to fully meet their basic needs, I would think the most precious resource would be consciousness-hours in a lifespan. Machines think faster than meat, which is one big incentive to change the hardware. Computers also don't have built-in expiration dates and you reduce health/lifespan issues to energy supply and hardware replacement. Once you convert to a fully synthetic form of life, I don't think it's obvious that the same imperatives for expansion hold they way they do for biological organisms in competitive environments.

One hallmark of intelligence is the awareness and foresight to abstain from or defer action. Every action requires effort and gets a return, and where the return isn't worth investment you choose not to do it. If you've upgraded your species to immortal AI, why procreate? If you've locked in virtual utopia and have enough fissionable mass to power it until protons evaporate, why bother with travel or dyson spheres?

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Once again, trying to divine the motivations of hypothetical civilizations is entertaining but largely irrelevant. In the universal laws of thermoeconomics, the conservation of energy and the conservation of momentum, we have all we need to understand the NECESSITY of resource maximalization and expansion.

There is no condition under which any civilization with the means to capture all the energy of its planet would stay on that planet. As they expand to maximize the resource utilization of their star, there is no condition under which that equilibrium will remain constant indefinitely either. Nothing will ever stay the same, meteors strike, ecosystems fail and even stars expand and collapse.

Basically even if we reach maximal resource equilibrium on Earth, ENTROPY WILL COMPEL US TO EXPAND. There is no infinite homeostatic state for any civilization, because entropy will leak energy out of any closed system. Desirability is not a consideration at all. __ALL__ civilizations on any level of the Kardashev scale is subject to this: A K-3 civilization would have to confront the Milky Way's collision with Andromeda in a couple billion years, a K-2 civilization would have to contend with the sun's expansion to a red giant and its inevitable collapse and a K-1 civilization would have to contend with ALL the other externalities that have caused mass extinctions on Earth five times over the last 500 million years.

Just as we don't need to imagine the zeitgeist of any given alien civilization to understand the necessity of expansion, we don't need to imagine the consequences entropy has in store for biomes who are unable to respond to cataclysmic changes, we have at least five empirical records of that in the one planet we know of that ever harbored life.

Ukerric said:

We already have the Tleilaxu.

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Fixed that for you!

This raises a point worth adding to the mix. Assuming humanity continues to allow the Tlielaxu to develop (and we will because humanity is dumb), by the time Earthlings make a serious effort at space travel there will be not one but two competing sentient species trying to colonize our solar system.

khorum said:

ENTROPY WILL COMPEL US TO EXPAND.

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Perhaps we're working on different definitions of "expand". Yes, you'd need to move to avoid locally catastrophic cosmic events. Yes, you'd need replace losses due to entropy. This does not expansion in the sense of perpetual exponential growth of the physical scale of the civilization.

As you say, moving between star systems could be done with 1960's technology. How would we have any idea if a radio-quiet, non-procreative civilization that for whatever reason didn't engage in stellar-scale engineering were out there?

I'm honestly trying to assume as little as possible, and that includes how something might respond to the realities of entropy. The only reason I'm sketching hypothetical motivations for alien civilization is as counter-examples to the embedded assumptions in your argument. I don't think it's an intuitively obvious requirement that a civilization build toward infinite energy consumption per unit of time. Every growth curve faces limits on some scale, and those can be internal or external.

Captain Suave said:

Perhaps we're working on different definitions of "expand". Yes, you'd need to move to avoid locally catastrophic cosmic events. Yes, you'd need replace losses due to entropy. This does not expansion in the sense of perpetual exponential growth of the physical scale of the civilization.

As you say, moving between star systems could be done with 1960's technology. How would we have any idea if a radio-quiet, non-procreative civilization that for whatever reason didn't engage in stellar-scale engineering were out there?

I'm honestly trying to assume as little as possible, and that includes how something might respond to the realities of entropy. I don't think it's intuitively obvious requirement that a civilization build toward infinite energy consumption per unit of time. Every growth curve faces limits on some scale.

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Lol that’s the Great Filter hypothesis, which was the start of this discussion in the Astronomy thread. No idea why it moved over here but the origin of the discussion was because some people expressed confusion or skepticism about the Great Filter.


Like I said. we don't need to imagine what happens to civilizations that refuse or fail to respond to energy scarcities and external pressures to expand, Earth's geological record is littered with the consequences of the ecosystem's failure to evolve a means to escape the gravity well: five times in the last 500 million years a cataclysmic event destroyed somewhere between 86% to 96% of all life on the planet.

It's entirely possible COMPLACENCY is why we don't see a sky full of dyson swarms and shkadov engines flying across the galaxy. It would be another candidate for the great filter.