Once we can see them, it’s too late
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Once we can see them, it’s too late
1–10 of 114 posts
Re: Once we can see them, it’s too late
#2The site appears to be down. (504 Gateway Timeout) https://archive.is/ki5Vm
Re: Once we can see them, it’s too late
#3This 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 and you should find that, on most of the planets where evolution achieves all the steps, it nearly runs out the planet’s clock in doing so.
Re: Once we can see them, it’s too late
#4Even in case #3, is it reasonable to assume that the aliens would expand in 3 dimensions at the speed of light?
And even of that is true, wouldn't we expect a significant fuzziness in that on the order of a millenium, where we see signs but haven't yet been engulfed?
Re: Once we can see them, it’s too late
#5This seems like a variant of a hypothesis I've heard before: "The universe is old enough, and the rate of expansion of a spacefaring civilization is fast enough (relative to the age of the universe, even at sub-light speeds) that either the aliens should already be here since long ago, or we're the first (or among the first)." ?
Re: Once we can see them, it’s too late
#6Hubrisimus. Our current models are the most useful ones we have that fit our limited dataset, but we have no clue whether we understand the first thing about space and time and the age and size of the universe(s).
Re: Once we can see them, it’s too late
#7Archive link: https://archive.vn/ki5Vm
Re: Once we can see them, it’s too late
#8Robin Hanson is a pretty decent high-concept sf author, and his occasional forays into cosmic horror can be enjoyable too. It's just too bad he ended up in the wrong line of work.
Re: Once we can see them, it’s too late
#9This 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…
But we had a billion years left. We have plenty of time to do whether we are going to do before the "planets clock runs out".
Re: Once we can see them, it’s too late
#10This 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.