Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
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Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
#2The Fermi Paradox is the contradiction between the very reasonable surmise that there must be other forms of technologically advanced life out there somewhere in our great galaxy and the complete lack of any evidence for it.
But not quite. This paradox assumes that a more technologically advanced society would naturally expand it's energy usage and output to the point that it could be detected by us. That is, expand it's energy output to be much more than our civilization's output since we actually couldn't detect a civilization of our own scale if it was on even the nearest star.
So the paradox is entirely speculative. Alienation civilizations might go in all sorts of ways. They might spend their resources on computation (as suggested by the article), they might consciously create low-energy-usage steady-state utopias, they might eventually destroy themselves, they might just never discover a way to attain such high energy usage, they might become so efficient they don't leak energy into space or something else we haven't thought it.
It's not that Fermi is entirely ridiculous to consider but the way is presented, a lot of people wouldn't know that the universe could full of earth-level societies and we wouldn't know and that's a bit annoying.
Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
#3The Fermi Paradox is the contradiction between the very reasonable surmise that there must be other forms of technologically advanced life out there somewhere in our great galaxy and the complete lack of any evidence for it. But not quite. This paradox assumes that a more technologically advanced society would naturally expand it's energy usage and output to the point that it could be detected by us. That is, expand…
But that’s the thing, if our galaxy had lots of 20-21st century Earth level civilizations, we would be able to detect them with our existing SETI programmes.
Personally I like the hypothesis that states eventually all comms will be encrypted and therefore indistinguishable from white noise.
Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
#4One of the comments at the bottom of the post points out what I believe to be a likely scenario:
"As we develop VR tech that allows us to simulate any world we desire, recreational or purpose driven, there is less and less reason to explore the rest of the universe."
Using humanity as a example for how intelligent life advances, we can look at the developed nations. The develop nations are the ones who would create any sort of technology that would get us out of the solar system and into contact with other life. Most, if not all developed nations are built through commercialization of products, with the citizens consuming those products. Only a very, very small portion of people are working on the advanced technology to take us elsewhere. So the majority of our species are not advancing galactic technology, but they are becoming larger consumers of entertainment, at least on the scale since early civilizations. Keeping that in mind, we are also somewhat physically locked in our solar system due to the laws of physics, at least in the near term. So, to me it would seem much more likely that instead of advancing space tech to the point where we are sending robots to other planets to self-replicate and spread across the universe, that by that time we would have already perfected VR and that our entertainment-based population would be well-satisfied simply living in our perfect little VR worlds. The two scenarios aren't mutually-exclusive. We are in fact advancing VR and building rockets for Mars as I write this, but I think it's also possible that simulating our reality could replace our desire to move outward. Since the universe is seemingly too far out of reach, we will just create our own here, for cheaper, sooner.
Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
#5The Fermi Paradox is the contradiction between the very reasonable surmise that there must be other forms of technologically advanced life out there somewhere in our great galaxy and the complete lack of any evidence for it. But not quite. This paradox assumes that a more technologically advanced society would naturally expand it's energy usage and output to the point that it could be detected by us. That is, expand…
But that’s the thing, if our galaxy had lots of 20-21st century Earth level civilizations, we would be able to detect them with our existing SETI programmes. Personally I like the hypothesis that states eventually all comms will be encrypted and therefore indistinguishable from white noise.
Or simply using tech we haven't discovered yet (i.e. some faster than light method).
Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
#6> advanced civilizations just want to compute
We got the answer right here. It's much more interesting and probable to meet AGI than aliens. Space travel is dangerous, but virtual space is just as interesting.
Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
#7The Fermi Paradox is the contradiction between the very reasonable surmise that there must be other forms of technologically advanced life out there somewhere in our great galaxy and the complete lack of any evidence for it. But not quite. This paradox assumes that a more technologically advanced society would naturally expand it's energy usage and output to the point that it could be detected by us. That is, expand…
But that’s the thing, if our galaxy had lots of 20-21st century Earth level civilizations, we would be able to detect them with our existing SETI programmes. Personally I like the hypothesis that states eventually all comms will be encrypted and therefore indistinguishable from white noise.
We could not detect civilizations at our level because standard transmissions decay the square of the distance and so such would be quantum noise by the time they got to the nearest start. And less than that by the time they further.
Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
#8If you sleep you're at the mercy of who doesn't sleep. You can take countermeasures but you're going to have surprises when your wake up.
Btw, the latest scifi I read on the subject is http://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/fermis-last-surv...
Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
#9The Fermi Paradox is the contradiction between the very reasonable surmise that there must be other forms of technologically advanced life out there somewhere in our great galaxy and the complete lack of any evidence for it. But not quite. This paradox assumes that a more technologically advanced society would naturally expand it's energy usage and output to the point that it could be detected by us. That is, expand…
But that’s the thing, if our galaxy had lots of 20-21st century Earth level civilizations, we would be able to detect them with our existing SETI programmes. Personally I like the hypothesis that states eventually all comms will be encrypted and therefore indistinguishable from white noise.
There's around 512 G-type stars in 100 light years radius around us. That's not many.
Milky Way radius is 100 000 light years.
If our galaxy had lots of civilizations that just learned radio in last 100 years - odds are quite high that we wouldn't be able to detect them YET, even if we had the technology to do so.
Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep
#10Isn't it better to compute now with lower efficiency than waiting millions/billions of years doing nothing?