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An existential problem in the search for alien life

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Re: An existential problem in the search for alien life

#71

Post by timschmidt »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #60
koheripbal wrote: post #15

It seems likely that, like us, intelligent life invents AGI prior to leaving their primary planet. Organic life is then merged/exterminated/controlled in favor of AGI. AGI would not have the biological instinct to grow/spread/reproduce, and thus the cosmos should be populated with a handful of individual billion year old super advanced AGIs, perhaps only one or two per galaxy, sitting quietly in orbit around some sta…

If that happens, then human organic biomass is the AGI’s microbiome and still required to build nuclear reactors to power its silicon.

How well have you been taking care of your microbiome lately? Remember Jerry, the yeast from the third villus on the left? No?

Re: An existential problem in the search for alien life

#72

Post by giraffe_lady »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #64
giraffe_lady wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can easily imagine faster than light travel but it simply isn't possible regardless. There are constraints on us other than our capacity for imagination. We have never seen another living planet so we don't know what to expect from one. I touched on this originally but I'll be explicit now: the fact that we can't create a closed ecosystem even given a working example and diverse raw materials is a powerful indicat…

Out of the trillions of galaxies out there and the trillions more solar systems, it is very likely that at least some of them have multiple planets with habitats suitable to whatever intelligent life evolves there. In that case, an interplanetary civilization would merely require reaching the other habitable planet, not trying to change its environment.

> it is very likely that at least some of them have multiple planets with habitats suitable to whatever intelligent life evolves there.

This assumption is exactly what I am challenging: that there is such a thing as "general suitability" to life.

We should be open to the possibility that a living system is only compatible with the specific circumstances it emerges from. We've seen nothing to indicate either way, of course, not having seen any other life. But we should not so comfortably assume it's a transferrable process.

Re: An existential problem in the search for alien life

#73

Post by reducesuffering »

hotpotamus wrote: post #30
nh23423fefe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AGI would not have the biological instinct to grow/spread/reproduce what supports this idea

I've often wondered what an AG(S?)I would want, and I tend to agree that most of our desires come from our innate biology and most of our reasoning goes into justifying said desires. Given that an artificial intelligence would be on an artificial substrate, it seems very difficult to imagine what, if anything, it might desire. These are philosophical threads that I'd honestly rather not pull, because I suspect that i…

Most of the actors involved in building AGI are incentivized by money (startup founders, VCs, employee stock comp), so $10 says what AGI gets instilled with is “how to make money line go up.” We’re going to get ExxonMobil Philip Morris on omnipotent crack.

Re: An existential problem in the search for alien life

#74

Post by zztop44 »

peddling-brink wrote: post #58
giraffe_lady wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are simply watching the birth of a new religion. Religious people aren't religious because they're dumb, intelligence is mostly not a factor. Same thing here I think.

Us: don’t build that, it will be the death of us. You: what a ridiculous statement, we haven’t even built that yet.

No one can even say what “that” is that we shouldn’t build. It’s a wholly arbitrary invention, the product of a collective word game that is more apologetics than serious futurology.

Re: An existential problem in the search for alien life

#75

Post by raverbashing »

emilecantin wrote: post #57
raverbashing wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really Dark forest is way down at the bottom of "plausible explanations" It just sounds like it makes sense for 3 min then it really, really doesn't Taking the (original) dark forest problem and applying it to civilizations in space sounds like a Strawman problem

Why doesn't it make sense?

- Attacking a planet that may or may not be a threat eventually is a much more expensive, noisy and slow endeavor than a shot in the dark in a forest.

(you can also think about all the technical hurdles such a thing would take, also remember that the fast something goes the harder it is to maneuver and to stop at the destination), don't underestimate all the kinds of noise that such thing will create and can be traced back to its origin.

- No species on Earth do that kind of unprovoked attack, unless it is very cheap and quick (and riskless)

So no, I think there are many better explanations than simply the dark forest one

Re: An existential problem in the search for alien life

#76

Post by mcpackieh »

timschmidt wrote: post #69
mcpackieh wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a reasonably logical answer but it's not the simplest answer. The Dark Forest hypothesis assumes that life is so common in the universe that encountering and being existentially threatened by other life is a serious threat. But what reason is there to believe that life is that common? For Liu Cixin's books this assumption makes sense because it makes the story possible, but in real life there's simply no evidenc…

> But what reason is there to believe that life is that common? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOiGEI9pQBs

Shit entertainment channel masquerading as educational content. If you think you learned something from that video then why haven't you explained it yourself?

The simple fact of the matter is that there is no empirical evidence for life outside of Earth. My guess is that it exists out there somewhere, but there's no good basis for believing that life is as common as the Dark Forest hypothesis requires.

Re: An existential problem in the search for alien life

#77

Post by jjk166 »

mcpackieh wrote: post #49
roywiggins wrote: post #43

> We have no idea if earthly life is average in the cosmos or some sort of freak outlier. Well, no, but it's totally reasonable to behave as if it is mostly average, at least for now. Looking under the streetlight[0] is a perfectly good idea when you've only managed to cover, like, a tiny percentage of the street so far. Once you run out of optimism about finding earthlike life (or it's become so common so as to be b…

Assuming that Earth was very average is a very rational place to start, but the reasonability of this assumption changes when we look elsewhere for life and fail to find it. Earth being average was once the basis for people assuming that other planets in our solar system might have intelligent civilizations; that has been almost entirely ruled out now (maybe there could be a civilization of space squid under the ice…

We have yet to find a single body of liquid water in the universe that we can confirm is devoid of life.

100% of worlds where Earth-like life could survive and that we have explored have an intelligent species living on them.

There isn't a single star system we have ruled out from having intelligent civilizations.

While we can put some bounds on things (some worlds are inhospitable to life as we know it, we're almost certainly the only intelligent species in our solar system at this time, we're likely the only intelligent civilization to inhabit our planet in at least the past few hundred million years, there probably isn't a recent galaxy-spanning empire in the milky way, there's likely no civilization actively trying to communicate with us, etc) there is absolutely no evidence that life as we know it is unusual either in terms of what sort of life is out there or how much.

Re: An existential problem in the search for alien life

#78

Post by timschmidt »

mcpackieh wrote: post #76
timschmidt wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what reason is there to believe that life is that common? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOiGEI9pQBs

Shit entertainment channel masquerading as educational content. If you think you learned something from that video then why haven't you explained it yourself? The simple fact of the matter is that there is no empirical evidence for life outside of Earth. My guess is that it exists out there somewhere, but there's no good basis for believing that life is as common as the Dark Forest hypothesis requires.

Two ad hominems in one comment. Way to go.

Re: An existential problem in the search for alien life

#79

Post by peddling-brink »

zztop44 wrote: post #74
peddling-brink wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Us: don’t build that, it will be the death of us. You: what a ridiculous statement, we haven’t even built that yet.

No one can even say what “that” is that we shouldn’t build. It’s a wholly arbitrary invention, the product of a collective word game that is more apologetics than serious futurology.

That's partially the point. We may not know it until it's too late.

But it doesn't matter. If you gave everyone a button and the warning that pushing it would end the human race, we'd all be dead pretty much immediately.

I think it's a given that on a long enough timescale, someone will create AGI and we'll no longer be the dominate race on earth. How that ends, in death, or slavery, I don't know.

I do hope that every AI researcher does their work with a small bit of fear of becoming the pet of an AGI.

Re: An existential problem in the search for alien life

#80

Post by emilecantin »

raverbashing wrote: post #75
emilecantin wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't it make sense?

- Attacking a planet that may or may not be a threat eventually is a much more expensive, noisy and slow endeavor than a shot in the dark in a forest. (you can also think about all the technical hurdles such a thing would take, also remember that the fast something goes the harder it is to maneuver and to stop at the destination), don't underestimate all the kinds of noise that such thing will create and can be trace…

I think that's where you're wrong. For a sufficiently advanced civilization, destroying another that's around our level would only entail destroying our planet. Hell, destroy the whole solar system to be sure. A "simple" way to do that would be to make the sun go supernova, or destroy it somehow.

How would you do that? There's a tremendous amount of energy already in it, it's releasing it gradually for now but what if there were ways to make it release all at once? One potential approach would be to throw something at it at relativistic speeds (you'd imagine accelerating things to near-lightspeed would be a pretty obvious milestone in the tech tree).

For an advanced civilization, this is pretty easy; they'd probably be able to do it routinely from a mobile spaceship so they don't have to give away their home star's position.

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