The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding • Hacker News Board

Re: The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding

#41

Post by yogthos » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 10:18 PM UTC

randomImmigrant wrote: post #34

yogthos wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that we are able to accumulate information across generations to grow our collective knowledge. Other animals are not able to do that at scale. So, while you are correct that other animal communicate and even teach each other, it's a qualitatively different situation from human communication.

We really don’t know this for certain at all. We do know crows can communicate information about the face of a person they dislike to their murder, including to new generations. It seems a bit of a stretch to say their cultural transmission is quite that narrow. In general, pre-writing human oral culture seems to have dynamics much in common with such abilities in other animals. Barring error correction mechanisms, o…

We kind of do though since we don't see crows accumulating knowledge at any scale comparable to humans and using this knowledge to shape their environment in increasingly complex ways. And crows very obviously do make tools and even teach each other to do it, so it's not like they don't have the inclination for it.

The language itself is a a human invention, and a product of how our brains are wired. However, there's a dialectical process here where the language shapes us in turn, and both our minds and our language evolve together. The reason we have more things to say stems from us accumulating knowledge and expanding out horizons through the use of our language.

Re: The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding

#42

Post by qayxc » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 10:25 PM UTC

Nevermark wrote: post #22

> Furthermore, light-speed lag and distance mean that child civilizations must be functionally independent of parent cultures. Makes me wonder if a solar system wide civilization, with trillions of beings, wouldn't invest in ships to go to the next system, extract resources, and create a stream of resources ships going back to the original solar system. That might sound uneconomical. Why not just go to the other syst…

> Long distance/time dependencies could develop and be naturally maintained via complex decentralized indirect but intertwined economic arrangements.

But that would require causality-breaking FTL, no? Otherwise the speed of light itself would create enough of an obstacle to make any trade impractical. Property rights only work if they are enforceable, which is the case on Earth but not over interstellar distances.

Re: The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding

#43

Post by aesbetic » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 10:31 PM UTC

AI is not bound by genetic bottlenecks.

Re: The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding

#44

Post by pianopatrick » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 10:44 PM UTC

qayxc wrote: post #39

pianopatrick wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if a generational ship is absolutely required. There's this assumption that interstellar ships would be full of human astronauts who are alive and awake. But that might not be strictly required. You might be able to have everybody go there frozen. Or have a robot ship that gives birth to the colonists from an artificial womb on arrival.

> You might be able to have everybody go there frozen. Common trope in sci-fi, pretty much impossible in practise. Humans aren't capable of surviving being frozen, we lack the genetic machinery for that. Could you breed/engineer hybernation-capable humans? Sure. Otherwise this approach would require to literally being able to kill and then resurrect people at will. > Or have a robot ship that gives birth to the colon…

As well, fertilized eggs and fetuses take up much less mass and do not require internal atmosphere too much. So you could have a smaller, simpler ship that takes less energy to get there

Re: The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding

#45

Post by pigpop » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 10:47 PM UTC

The corruption of the Fermi Paradox is a personal bugaboo of mine. Somewhere along the way everyone started getting it completely wrong, interpreting it as being about galactic colonization and the spread of intelligent life throughout the galaxy. I don't know where this came from but I deeply wish people would stop calling it the Fermi Paradox and give it its own name.

Fermi's contention of "where are they?" was predicated on two things 1) the probability that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the galaxy and 2) that faster than light travel is possible and would be discovered by a technological society.

The napkin math that Fermi did was essentially what we now know as the Drake equation. One important variable in this is the duration of a technological civilization. I personally believe that Fermi would assign the probability of a civilization existing for "geological timescales" necessary to colonize the galaxy using slower than light travel at zero which is a clear resolution to this Not-Fermi Paradox. His paradox is only so because he thought FTL would be discovered in the not very distant future which makes the duration required for a technological civilization quite small and allows them to visit many worlds quickly, with or without a galactic empire which in this interpretation could realistically exist for a normal timescale and not the frankly ridiculous millions of years that the Not-Fermi Paradox always seems to take for granted.

tldr; if it doesn't involve FTL it's not the Fermi Paradox, choose a different name

Re: The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding

#46

Post by pigpop » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 10:54 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #13

> Back of the envelope calculations suggest that even modest propulsion technology should be sufficient for a single technological species to spread throughout the galaxy in a geological instant I think this is where it all went wrong. Overly optimistic assumptions from atomic age thinkers about how technology was going to overcome all obstacles in the near future based on their recent life experience. The thinkers s…

I don't think they were wrong about that. I think what they were wrong about is that we could maintain our civilization at the same level they experienced long enough to make significant progress. We dropped the ball in less than two generations and it's yet to be determined if we can pick it back up.

Re: The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding

#47

Post by pigpop » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 11:03 PM UTC

jacobgold wrote: post #17

nkrisc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe expanding beyond your home planet never gets as easy as we think it will be in the future.

That seems unlikely. Just imagine humanity 100, 1000, and 1,000,000 years from now. Humans will have solved every physical problem that is solvable. Humans will have also evolved into new kinds of immortal/superintelligent beings that would be totally unrecognizable to us. It may be the case once a civilization reaches "max level" they universally decide to "reset the game" because there's nothing left to do. Maybe s…

No cohesive civilization on earth has been able to continue uninterrupted for 1000 years, our chances aren't as good as you think they are especially since our current civilization is showing all of the signs of being over the hill and accelerating in its decline. Technological advances can be lost and the capacity of a civilization to accomplish far reaching goals can stall and degrade and eventually cease all together. Anyone who doesn't think we're on a ticking clock is either hopelessly optimistic or ignorant of history, probably both.

Re: The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding

#48

Post by pigpop » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 11:07 PM UTC

c048 wrote: post #21

nkrisc wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that? Life on Earth has been around for billions of years and and yet we have no immortal beings nor all problems in physics solved. There’s no reason beyond wishful thinking to believe any of that is true.

Everything we know and see has proven that progress is exponential. Your statement that progress or intelligence is binary has no basis outside of intentional and ignorant pessimism.

Tell that to the Romans or the Chinese or the Ottomans or the Egyptians or the Greeks or the...

Re: The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding

#49

Post by bryanrasmussen » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 11:10 PM UTC

pigpop wrote: post #45

The corruption of the Fermi Paradox is a personal bugaboo of mine. Somewhere along the way everyone started getting it completely wrong, interpreting it as being about galactic colonization and the spread of intelligent life throughout the galaxy. I don't know where this came from but I deeply wish people would stop calling it the Fermi Paradox and give it its own name. Fermi's contention of "where are they?" was pre…

You are wrong.

First, I would just naturally assume you are wrong as Fermi would have known that FTL was practically impossible.

Fermi evidently made the comment in the 1950s at Los Alamos, as I understand it became widely known due to Carl Sagan's 1963 paper "Direct contact among galactic civilizations by relativistic interstellar spaceflight"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/003206...

What the Fermi paradox involves is near light speeds, because, as Sagan says in the paper above "Interstellar spaceflight at relativistic velocities has several obvious advantages... all points in the Galaxy are accessible within the lifetime of a human crew, due to relativistic time dilation."

There is also the Michael Hart paper "Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrials on Earth" from 1975 but I have not found any satisfactory for open reading source of this online.

At any rate it seems absurd that any famous physicist of the last 90 years at least would ever have suggested that aliens should have been here because they would have had faster than light travel. You are essentially saying Fermi thought Einstein's Theory of Relativity was very much wrong.

on edit: I said 90 years to hedge bets in case there was some really old guy still hanging around in 1935, science progressing one funeral at a time and all that. But it seems really unlikely that there would have been.

Re: The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding

#50

Post by pigpop » Sat, Jul 18, 2026, 11:18 PM UTC

jacobgold wrote: post #30

temp0826 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Civilizations collapse, do you think we're immune to that now because technology is at some level?

Of course humanity is not immune, but it is resilient. Even if 99.99% of people died from an asteroid, it might only take a few hundred (or thousand) years to rebuild the population and the world. And once humans live on multiple planets, which is likely within 100 years, the odds of permanent extinction become remote.

Brother, it takes several hundred years to recover from a political collapse of a civilization. A few thousand is in the ballpark for a 90% reduction in population coincident with a similar loss in knowledge. A 99.99% reduction would be more like tens of thousands of years.

It's not just that we need to have people living on another planet, we need a fully self-sufficient civilization on another planet which is at least 200+ years of sustained effort probably more because it took that long under the relatively ideal and easy conditions of simply settling another continent. Then factor in that their civilization would be even more precarious than ours and face many more dangers.