161–170 of 327 posts
I love that series -- just an incredible, imaginative, unique perspective -- but the dark forest hypothesis just doesn't make sense. It's orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude less energy to communicate with (including obscuring your origin, if you want) than destroy a civilization. And communication has potential benefits (cooperation) that destruction does not. Civilizations that communicated would very quickl…
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> if you've colonized say 20 stars, what disaster could possibly end your civilization? Unfortunately, war with another civilization.
I mean, maybe. Honestly hard for me to imagine war actually going on between two interstellar civilizations. But even if it did, it seems like in 99% of all cases, that would leave at least one of the two civilizations still around. We're looking for explanations, in this hypothesis, that leave 98% of all time with no civilizations.
Like if on Earth nukes were something everyone could cook up in their backyard in an afternoon, we'd all be gone pretty quick.
Not sure that really makes any sense though.
To me the most likely back of the napkin answer to the Fermi paradox is that aliens are elsewhere in time. The Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light years across but about 13.5 billion years old. So it’s like 135,000x deeper in the time direction than the distance direction. We’re in the light cones of all the stars we can see, and as far as we know, we can’t get out of them. If a civilization ended even 100 years…
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> Great Filters, natural extinctions like impact events or gamma ray bursts you know what really alarms me? these things are only chances on a very, very short-time scale. they are inevitable, yet no one seems alarmed when meteors come between us and the moon and we dont see it coming until hours beforehand. sun bursts blowing out the electric grid, nuclear war, antiobotic resistance, crop and animal monoculture, cli…
> you know what really alarms me? these things are only chances on a very, very short-time scale. they are inevitable, yet no one seems alarmed when meteors come between us and the moon and we dont see it coming until hours beforehand. That is why Elon is so hell bent on making humanity multi planetary.
Besides, anything at all that we can imagine hitting the earth (except a gamma ray burst or collision with another planet) would still leave the earth in a better shape than Mars is. It's entirely doubtful that humanity could be self-sustaining on Mars even in principle, it is certainly not possible with known technologies.
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I question your use of "implies" there. It implies no such thing. What you suggest is one possible answer, nothing more.
Yup, to me it implies a darker problem, that FLT is something that can't be surpassed. All civs might advance to that understanding and decide to maybe just occupy nearby solar systems and nothing more. We may not talk to them simply because it's both incredibly expensive and will yield nothing more than "Yup, we're stuck here, so are you".
If, instead of doing a product of the probability of each event, you actually take the various distributions into account (nowadays you can easily test a wide variety of distributions with monte carlo methods) then, the probability of getting into contact with another life in the universe becomes vanishingly small.
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That and the fact that civilizations probably only broadcast EM radiation out into the void for a short period of time before they start getting into energy efficiency and switch over to more efficient communication technologies.
This is my theory. You look at human civilization and that's exactly what's happened. We started off by broadcasting everything as loud as we could (which isn't very loud) and we've slowly transitioned to signals that are both quieter and don't really survive escaping the atmosphere. I can't imagine an advanced species wouldn't follow a similar communications path. The only way we detect them is if they specifically…
After a long while, there might be this great replacement, totally peaceful, that would lead these conscious organisms with a vastly superior intellectual efficiency to probably become very small and self centered and not behave like the territorial monkeys we are. What do you think a massively singular electronic intelligence will think when it notices a planet like ours ? "nuke them all and rape their women" ? This is monkey behavior that we still haven't fully shaken up.
I don't agree that Civilizations need to expand without limit. Even humans, having reached a certain level of comfort, have difficulty reproducing enough to maintain population levels. Conceivably then, civilizations will reach a comfortable size and then stop. Certainly they might be willing to stop when they reach a "boundary".
The problems with enemies is that, unless we are of sufficient size, we might bump into an enemy that is, say, twice our size, and therefore can thump us in a war. However, novels by Iain M. Banks [2] and Neal Asher [3] provide insight here (Culture vs Iridans, Polity vs Prador). The issue is not how many weapons you have (W), or even how many weapons you can make (dW/dt), but how fast you can make weapons factories (d2w/dt2) (etc). And ultimately, organics simply have absolutely no chance against AI: in both Culture and Polity, the AI runs the war for humans.
On the matter of technological breakout, the entire Lensman series has an underlying theme of the back-and-forth of new weapon vs it's mitigation [5]. Liu makes a good case that such back-and-forth is unrealistic: in the time it takes light to travel from the enemy's star to yours, they might go from poking each other with pointy sticks to fusion bombs, or from fusion bombs to star-killers. But there is a simple mitigation there too: don't hang around stars. Or rather, think of stars as Navies think of islands: nice place to refuel and R&R, but don't put all your ships in one harbor.
Ultimately, if survival is the goal, then Salvation or We are Bob [4] are the way to go: expand as much as possible. Just be willing to defer to existing civilizations.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34068552-salvation
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5807106.Iain_M_Banks
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/56353.Neal_Asher
[4] https://www.amazon.com/Are-Legion-Bob-Bobiverse-Book-ebook/d...
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Right, if you have the tech to allow you to course correct an object traveling at relativistic speeds you have the tech to defend against on by moving it out of the way.
Yep, that's probably correct. Even more because you can just throw something into the projectile too, and destroy it... And they can throw something into your projectile, and etc. I don't think anybody can make any claim on what side is easier. But targeting the attack does not seem to be the hard part.
Worse, it doesn’t need to be some solid object. A loose field of debris 1,000 miles wide could sterilize a planet with enough mass and enough velocity.
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Short lived on those timescales, yes. But not necessarily short lived in terms of our perspective. If we imagine that in the last 5 billion years, there have been a good solid 10,000 post-industrial civilizations, and each of those civilizations has lasted 10,000 years (in the post-industrial stage where they're detectable), then that implies that of the last 5,000,000,000 years, 100,000,000 of them have been host to…
> if you've colonized say 20 stars, what disaster could possibly end your civilization? Unfortunately, war with another civilization.
If we can control resource, exchange knowledge and techniques, and reproduce automatically (for instance if we become small electronic machines rather than the current inefficient chemical process we are), "war" might probably sounds both ridiculous and totally ineffective, both to cull us if we're abstract enough, and to cull potential enemies, probably just as impossible to reach "physically".