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Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

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21–30 of 124 posts

Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#21
post #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.

Cool plot line for a SF novel. We advance VR so much that we end up meeting another civilization THERE instead of outside.

And they struggle to understand us.

Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#22
post #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.

Cool plot line for a SF novel. We advance VR so much that we end up meeting another civilization THERE instead of outside.

Permutation City and Diaspora by Greg Egan are great and at times touch on ideas like this.

Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#23
post #8

If 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...

I'm thinking in a way, those awake may be at the mercy of those who sleep. Say the sleepers could hide - they could avoid a lot of turmoil, like these bamboo species that germinate for a hundred years, thus avoiding herbivores and vermin. Sleepers also can presumably also conserve resources better while those awake may build, and loose empires in the process.

Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#24
Besides the easy answer that we're looking in the wrong places by virtue of using current human technology, my take is that an "advanced" civilization capable of interstellar travel will have learned to be way more efficient with energy usage. They'd have to be efficient for "advanced" energy usage to be cheap enough at the scale of a civilization instead of rare and expensive moonshot projects.

So they're only undetectable as a side effect of being efficient. Not because they're hiding or have all died in a cosmic extinction.

Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#26

The 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…

The notion in the article is great fodder for a novel, but I think this perspective is sound. You've said almost as much, but I think there's a good argument to be made that societies which undergo an industrial revolution either collapse the ecology that supports them, or survive it by maturing and expending energy on QoL for the whole biosphere. In either case the window of time for making a cosmic racket is fairly…

The argument I've heard most is that a civilization only has a short time where it's blasting broadcasts into space willy-nilly, before improving their tech and making it more efficient, thus dramatically lowering its potential to be discovered by its stray broadcasts.

Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#27
post #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.

Cool plot line for a SF novel. We advance VR so much that we end up meeting another civilization THERE instead of outside.

[deleted]

Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#28

My humble impression is that each and every philosophical hypotesis we make is somewhat based on human paradygms, structures, and super-structures. Why can’t we accept that we populated this world for the equivalent of a cosmic blink, and we are therefore unequipped to even grasp the existence of other life forms? I am a fan of Bostrom’s conjecture about the simulation, though. 1/3 is a damn high probability. At the…

> each and every philosophical hypotesis we make is somewhat based on human paradygms, structures, and super-structures Unfortunately, we can't do it any other way, by the very nature of conscious thoughts. > Why can’t we accept that we populated this world for the equivalent of a cosmic blink, and we are therefore unequipped to even grasp the existence of other life forms? Why should we? We might be doing a lousy jo…

> We might be doing a lousy job, but we're doing the best we can.

We've literally never done this before, so we don't even have a very good idea whether we're doing a good job or not, that's how clueless we are. Signs are pointing to us more or less killing ourselves, though.

Re: Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep

#30
We couldn’t detect a remote civilization at a 21st century equivalent stage of development. But at 22nd century level, they’d be able to launch a Bracewell-von Neumann self-replicating interstellar probe... and it would take just one such event to lead to the permanent saturation of the Galaxy by its descendants. So where are they? The only really satisfactory conclusion is that we’re the first or only civilization to approach a BvN launch.
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