The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998)

#51

Post by im2w1l » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 8:49 PM UTC

wyager wrote: post #7

Zigurd wrote: post #3

There remain some big tests, among them: Can we accumulate and release enough energy to take us to the stars without having a civilization-ending war with ultra-destructive directed energy weapons? Can we avoid mistakes in modifying life, and in nanotech, that would cover the planet in goo? Can we master germline modifications of humans without doing something that ends with no humans, and no post-humans? So plenty o…

>Can we accumulate and release enough energy to take us to the stars without having a civilization-ending war This is why, if I invented antimatter production, I would absolutely demand that it not be used on Earth until it had been used to send hundreds of human-bearing seed ships to other solar systems. The risk is too great.

Imo, we should be sending out seed ships with hardy microorganisms already now.

Re: The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998)

#52

Post by Retra » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 8:51 PM UTC

radicalbyte wrote: post #44

thesteamboat wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No one wants to talk to us" is not a sufficient explanation. We need to be able to explain why we don't observe any stellar engineering. Assuming alien civilizations they either 1) can't make use of the most prominent energy sources around, 2) choose not to for some reason, or 3) we can't detect what they're doing. 1 and 2 don't make sense if you assume that there are many alien civilizations older and more advanced…

What if "dark matter" is actually stars enclosed in dyson spheres? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

Dark matter is 26.8% of the mass and visible matter is 4.9%. Think about what has to happen for that assumption to pan out...

Re: The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998)

#53

Post by Udo » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 9:17 PM UTC

Retra wrote: post #50

Udo wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are certainly correct - but did I imply otherwise in my comment..?

No, I was agreeing with you on a parallel point.

Ah, okay, sorry for the confusion. Sometimes I'm not sure if I manage to get my points across :)

Re: The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998)

#54

Post by api » Sun, Apr 05, 2015, 10:09 PM UTC

taygetea wrote: post #36

api wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"your claim seems reminiscent to previous claims that humanity would soon not be able to grow enough food for the projected population" This is a cautionary tale about something that stock market traders know well: never try to call the top of a bubble. You'll just look like a fool, and if you bet on it you will lose all your money. The "Population Bomb" crowd in the 70s and the peak oilers of today tried to do just…

The comment you were responding to wasn't referring to the 1970s, it was referring to the repeated cries of Malthusian catastrophes dating back to Malthus himself. The unexpected technology mentioned was a 50-fold increase in agricultural productivity per person working in agriculture. Several times in the last several hundred years, similar patterns were pointed out. All of them were solved with technology they had…

All of them have been solved so far by using more fossil fuels. It's nice to have a line of credit, but we know neither the limit nor the interest rate.

Re: The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998)

#55

Post by chevman » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 12:26 AM UTC

exratione wrote: post #2

Two things to bear in mind when thinking about the Fermi paradox: 1) The more important observation is that everything we see is a wilderness of apparently natural origins and processes, not that we have apparently not been visited. 2) No hypothesis involving choice that leads to failure to carry out self-replicating colonization can explain (1). All it takes is one small group in one sufficiently advanced species. T…

Can you suggest some of your favorite speculations? Or links to other material?

Re: The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998)

#56

Post by slowmovintarget » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 1:31 AM UTC

elorant wrote: post #11

PeterWhittaker wrote: post #6

We suffer from hubris when we label it the "Fermi paradox ": It implies that somehow we are interesting, worth visiting. If we are, it may well be as a cautionary tale or for tourism. Consider the energy and material engineering necessary to achieve long-distance space transport of any sizable amount of people, equipment, and supplies. Regardless of whether the transport is subluminal or FTL, the energy requirements…

Your argument is kind of contradictory. It assumes that we are not worthy of visiting but an argument like that suggests that they’ve already found us and interstellar travel is feasible. They’ve also solved all the logistic problems you’re referring to. Whether they like to make contact or not is somewhat irrelevant to this context. For the sake of argument let’s linger on that assumption for a while. How for exampl…

Or for a longer read, David Brin gives it an excellent and lengthy treatment in Existence [1]. He even works in an exhaustive analysis of the possible answers to the Fermi Paradox, as well as possible events constituting The Great Filter. I won't give spoilers but it's definitely worth reading.

  [1] http://www.amazon.com/Existence-David-Brin/dp/0765342626/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1428283635&sr=8-3&keywords=existence

Re: The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? (1998)

#57

Post by ArkyBeagle » Mon, Apr 06, 2015, 12:02 PM UTC

api wrote: post #30

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely no guarantee of collapse. Per capita, people live cleaner year by year whether they make "ecologically sound" signalling choices or not. Within the last 50 years, this has been very profound. It's too early to say, but my money's on population crashing first. 100 years ago, you could see nearly anyplace a large population at something approaching the Malthusian limit; that's much reduced now. The…

"people live cleaner year by year" I'm not talking about cleanliness. That's a quality of life factor but ultimately it's not what's important. The important thing is supply, mostly of energy. (It's also important to note that to a great extent the West has cleaned up its environment by outsourcing polluting industries to Asia, Africa, and South America.) Last I checked we still got more than 80% of our energy from f…

Fusion isn't something that we can simply order. People are working on it. I'm far from even ... ignorance on the state of the art there, but my guess would be that investing more would probably not produce it any faster.

Cleanliness - basic control of waterborne disease, the level of schmutz from power, control of pernicious trash - is huge. Queen Victoria's husband Albert died of this sort of disease 150ish years ago. This is vanishingly rare now if it exists at all.

I don't buy "90% in medieval subsistence level poverty" because medieval subsistence level poverty doesn't scale. It went obsolete even with the potato as a base food crop in the early 19th Century - I'd accuse the Irish potato famine of ending anything remotely like it. If there's feudalism again, then it's because we can't organize ourselves in anything more efficient than that.

I can't say that some sort of Malthusian equilibrium is impossible, only that it seems unlikely. Historically, we had two notable examples in the 20th Century - the Ukrainian famine post the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Chinese Great Leap Forward. Both were, paradoxically, caused by belief systems grounded in Malthusian predictions. Now that's largely inductive predicting on my part, but we just know better now.

There's a heck of a lot of muddling through between going to the stars and a continuous Malthusian crisis. I'd say "going to the stars" has more than anything else failed to capture at least the popular imagination.