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Once we can see them, it’s too late

scottaaronson.com

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Re: Once we can see them, it’s too late

#91

Post by ncmncm »

chronolitus wrote: post #53

I like to imagine that this is how things would look if we entered a Karadashev type III civilization's light cone: One day, in a small quadrant of the galaxy, we'd notice starts "shutting off", simply going dark. After a few months, our astonomers would confirm their new model: the amount of stars going dark is increasing. Days later: the rate of increase itself, is increasing. One day we'd wake up, and a small port…

Doesn't it seem kind of stupid that a K-III civilization would depend on collecting starlight for energy? Even the most extreme-primitive cultures, barely off their home planet, will have mastered controlled fusion.

Almost immediately, they have no more use for small rocky gravity-well planets, or even for stars. They live in Oort clouds where thermal noise is low and cold is plentiful.

Re: Once we can see them, it’s too late

#92

Post by fao_ »

For a long time I've figured that the Fermi Paradox is not much of a paradox.

Open question: Are we likely to be able to detect the difference between large asteroids and a small swarm of habitable environments in a star.

And the second question is: Is it worth spreading out? An advanced civilisation can defend against or modify (maybe even focus) the damage that an imploding star would cause, and an Issac Arthur video on the topic of the amount of space we have in the solar system states clearly that there's more than enough for trillions of trillions of trillions of habitats. There doesn't seem to be much reason for spreading a civilization out whatsoever, given the cost of communication and the assumed cultural and informational lag between the settlement and the source civilization.

As the article states, it's unlikely to be the case that we see an expansive civilization until it's too late.

Re: Once we can see them, it’s too late

#93

Post by daveFNbuck »

ndjtjgkglf wrote: post #65
eloff wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you individually control the photons, I'm not sure that's possible. Matter still behaves like a wave at quantum levels. I don't know enough to say with certainty. This is all highly speculative.

You don't need all your photons to get to the destination. Only some of them. And you can use error correcting methods to ensure they have a useful pattern when they arrive.

If the errors are happening further out than your civilization has ever been, what's correcting them?

Re: Once we can see them, it’s too late

#94

Post by ncmncm »

bob33212 wrote: post #84
uxcolumbo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the climate crisis halting or slowing down technological progress?

Climate change is not a big deal as far as innovation goes. It is an enormous disaster for specific cities though

Only if civilization doesn't collapse.

But there is no reason to expect better. All the signs point there. Global climate disruption destroys crop yields in tropical and subtropical places, creating political instability. Millions, then tens of millions, then hundreds of millions of refugees flee toward higher latitudes. Nations at higher latitudes elect fascists to repel them. Fascists start wars, wars disrupt trade, economies collapse, nuclear weapons come out, boom.

It would be nice to be wrong about this, but it has all started already. 70M+ Americans voted for fascism. Brazil, Turkey, Hungary, India already got it. Germany, France, UK, Italy, Poland threaten. China and Russia fell long ago. Europe is already strained by the first few million refugees.

Sending the hundreds of millions of refugees on to Siberia and the Yukon could work, in principle.

Re: Once we can see them, it’s too late

#95

Post by ctdonath »

lisper wrote: post #41
ctdonath wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think “matter scanner/printer”. Scan an object, at atomic & energy vector level. Transmit that information to a destination’s printer. Expansion is then indeed at speed of light, capped only by need to physically move a small “seed” printer (rapid transport may have enormous energy cost, but that’s all that needs moving; everything else is just data). Having seen tech go from digital imaging to 3D organ printing in a…

But first you have to deliver the printer to the destination somehow.

Yes, but a whole lot easier to deliver a printer than a functioning civilization, when you can just print a civilization.

Re: Once we can see them, it’s too late

#96

Post by ctdonath »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #59
lisper wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But first you have to deliver the printer to the destination somehow.

Here's an idea. Imagine you have a way to build von Neumann probes that can boost themselves to some high fraction of c (say, 0.9). You start pumping them out in your home system, and send them towards some stars - not necessarily the closest ones. You keep sending them . There's now a shell expanding at 0.9c that's shaped by your production capabilities. Of course, the probes will spend time accelerating and then de…

Would make a great toy, implemented along the lines of Universal Paperclips.

Re: Once we can see them, it’s too late

#97

Post by _y5hn »

bob33212 wrote: post #84
uxcolumbo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the climate crisis halting or slowing down technological progress?

Climate change is not a big deal as far as innovation goes. It is an enormous disaster for specific cities though

Climate instability would unlock changes that one by one cause feedback to worsen the situation irreversibly. The bio diversity that prevents this, we actively destroy every day.

Re: Once we can see them, it’s too late

#98

Post by bob33212 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #86
bob33212 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a time machine so no I cannot prove what will happen in the future

Fine, but you seem to regard it as at least virtually certain. Why? What is your basis for regarding it as close to certain?

https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revol...

Re: Once we can see them, it’s too late

#99

Post by fallingfrog »

This is extrapolation from an extremely small set of facts, and tremendously conjectural assumptions. It’s the kind of thing you might expect to see from a person living in a civilization that just discovered electrons 200 years ago. Come back to me in 100 years once the economy and population has reached some kind of steady state and then let’s revisit some of these claims.

A lot of what we think is rational discourse is actually ingrained, unspoken ideology floating to the surface and being coated with a patina of post hoc rationalization. That’s why it’s so hard to do science properly, especially social science- people don’t even know that they have biases, let alone what they are. But biases aren’t something you can point at directly and say, this belief is not true, it’s more that you might be overestimating the probability of truth of a whole bunch of little things by 10 percent and that creates a self reinforcing network of probable facts that adds up to weird beliefs when they are all put together.

The author of the article believes on some deep level that progress is inevitable and will go on indefinitely, combined with the unconscious imagery of a lifetime watching science fiction films, and a life of watching progressively more impressive gadgets appear on store shelves. It all adds up to essays like this.

Re: Once we can see them, it’s too late

#100

Post by isoprophlex »

bpodgursky wrote: post #10
isoprophlex wrote: post #3

This is the most profound thing I've read in a while. I'm tempted to whip up some numerical simulation to verify this to some extent... > But here’s the interesting part: conditioned on all the steps having succeeded, we should find ourselves near the end of the useful lifetime of our planet’s star—simply because the more time is available on a given planet, the better the odds there. I.e., look around the universe a…

Robin has done a fair bit of numerical simulation on his OP posts here https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/12/how-far-aggressive-al... , and says he'll have an actual paper out in a week or two.

Thanks! Looking forward to reading the paper..!
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