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Nail Rat posted:Interstellar travel may simply not be a solvable problem, meaning there might not ever be any civilizations that actually spread throughout the galaxy, and they stay localized to one planet or a handful of planets and moons. That would make it even more vanishingly difficult to pinpoint them. The simulations run that show a single civilization able to fill in the whole galaxy in the paper I linked extrapolate that you could use technology not much more advanced than the Voyager space probe. You don't really need a civilization *that* much more advanced than what we currently to get the ball rolling. Edit: As Bardo says!
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Sep 16, 2019 20:08
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BardoTheConsumer posted:The issue with that argument is that a generation ship could theoretically be built with *today's* technology if we decided as a species it was necessary (since the cost would obviously be prohibitive unless we were all in on it). So if many cultures have gone before surely someone had the "set up a sustainable biosphere in a metal box and throw it at the nearest habitable planet" idea. Sure, but what then? If we threw 100 people in a metal box onto Mars what would that be in 100 years? All dead.
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Sep 16, 2019 20:09
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ashpanash posted:The Fermi paradox isn't about radio. It's about the idea that interstellar civilization should be common. If that were true, where are they? I'm always feeling people bringing this up simply do not understand the scales of time and space involved. Space is impossibly huge and the universe is old enough in comparison to the time we're searching we basically haven't started at all. Even if the galaxy is full with hundreds or even thousands of interstellar civilizations right this moment, our chances of finding them are slim to none. We'd have to search actively for thousands of years to even have a chance of finding even one of them. At the same time, our chances are so stacked against us, most of them will probably be already extinct by the point we're finding them. And if they then turn out to be alien enough we will misinterpret their ruins as completely natural remnants of some kind of rare cosmic phenomena, followed by wildly proclaiming that aliens don't exist while literally standing in the ruins of their capital. Nail Rat posted:Interstellar travel may simply not be a solvable problem, meaning there might not ever be any civilizations that actually spread throughout the galaxy, and they stay localized to one planet or a handful of planets and moons. That would make it even more vanishingly difficult to pinpoint them. Maybe not by us, but worst case, some alien dumbasses will show up after our demise and stand in our ruins, wondering what kind of strange, but completely natural phenomenon could have possibly created the weird lapisian ferroids surrounding them Libluini fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Sep 16, 2019 |
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Sep 16, 2019 20:10
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1glitch0 posted:How does finding potential life clash with the Fermi paradox? If there are interstellar civilisations yeeting between the stars in a distant galaxy, visible to our telescopes now, that means they were doing it billions of years ago. This raises a pretty major issue - why not in our galaxy too? Such a species could have the entire galaxy fully exploited by now. There would be no way to miss them, or their works. And if the emergence of such a civilization is still a rare random event, the fact that it exists at all in multiple galaxies billions of years ago put some lower bounds on the improbability of it, implying again that an interstellar civilization should already have the galaxy fully colonised, as the passing billions of years would make the emergence of spacefaring civilisations during that time become a near certainty. The Fermi paradox implies this is most likely to be a natural phenomenon. Bug Squash fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Sep 16, 2019 |
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Sep 16, 2019 20:42
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Libluini posted:I'm always feeling people bringing this up simply do not understand the scales of time and space involved. Space is impossibly huge and the universe is old enough in comparison to the time we're searching we basically haven't started at all. Agree. Like, let's say our technology and civilization is as good as it gets within the physics of the universe, and it's just a matter of putting in the work and building ships piece by piece, building rockets, processing fuel, etc. Let's say we can build generation ships and self-sustaining colonies on inhospitable rocks. From even the next star over, it would be virtually impossible to detect us, even if alien astronomers detected Earth as a goldilocks planet with liquid water. So without having aliens literally fly up to Earth in their smelly generation ship or automated embryo-hatching probe, how would we know they exist at all. If it's not actually possible to build megastructures with infinitely advanced material science and there are no sci-fi physics to discover, it's entirely possible that the galaxy is teeming with intelligent life, and we have no way to detect each other short of randomly bumping into each other on accident, and even if we did, very limited ways to communicate that information over interstellar distances.
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Sep 16, 2019 20:45
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Libluini posted:I'm always feeling people bringing this up simply do not understand the scales of time and space involved. Space is impossibly huge and the universe is old enough in comparison to the time we're searching we basically haven't started at all. You really think Enrico Fermi didn't understand that? Even if we were to find nothing alive right now, if there were any alive before now, and they were widespread, we'd expect to see their debris. Maybe their leftover handiwork in some form. We see nothing that is not entirely consistent with natural forces. Keep in mind, the whole point is that there should be a lot, but we don't see any. So even if they are too alien, well, if there are a lot, then we'd expect *some* to be enough like us to recognize. If they avoid younger civilizations, then we'd expect *some* to not do that. If they hide well, we'd expect *some* to do a worse job of it. If space is too huge for any of them to get anywhere - well, that answers the paradox. None of them get anywhere - or at least, not enough for us to notice. If the ones that get through are too alien, again, that answers the paradox. Space is too big and it's too rare for civilization to get past some filter. The whole point of there being a 'paradox' in the first place is that our assumptions tell us that one thing should be true - in this case, there should be tons of civilizations all over the galaxy - and yet our evidence tells us exactly the opposite. If our assumptions that lead to the conclusion are flawed, then there is no paradox.
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Sep 16, 2019 21:07
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Infinite Karma posted:Agree. Here's the thing: you're imagining everyone getting started at the same time like it's a 4X game. That's pretty much impossible in practice. How soon could intelligence have started on Earth? Did we really need to spend a billion years as microbes, or 300 million hiding from Dinos? Even once we became Homo sapiens, does it have to take so long to reach technology. Could we skip the dark ages? However you cut it, it's really easy to come up with a scenario where we're up into space massively earlier than in our timeline. And that's just working from the planet Earth. Surely there's an equivalent planet that formed with the right conditions much much earlier. If it's possible to do interstellar travel, then no matter how slow and clumsily that gets done, you can colonise an entire galaxy in a finite space of time. Estimates vary around million years, give or take an order of magnitude or two. When you weight that against how much earlier space travel could have gotten started, it implies that there should be aliens everywhere already. The fact that there isn't requires one more of the assumptions in the preceding chain of logic to be wrong. Which is where the discussion gets interesting.
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Sep 16, 2019 21:09
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A really important point that I want to keep in mind is this: for every reason that humankind has not yet made it as a space-faring civilization, does that same reason necessarily apply across all other possible species? This is the framing that's important, because you need to find a reason why some barrier that makes it infeasible for us, presently, to do it also exists for all other sentient life in the universe. For example, the idea that:Nail Rat posted:Like, it's becoming pretty obvious we'll never survive to get anywhere other than Mars if we even get there. I imagine a lot of civilizations that achieve spaceflight would have a similarly short timeframe. Advanced civilization isn't very compatible with not killing your planet with pollution. OK, fair enough point. But the point that the Great Filter makes is that the time-scales involved in the universe, and space and so on, makes it so that every single civilization ever has to fall under the same problems, or else we would be seeing civilizations everywhere, or their remnants. Even if it was really rare that a civilization manages to not kill itself, like 1/1,000,000,000, the one civilization that managed not to, would spread across their galaxy in a few million years. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Sep 16, 2019 |
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Sep 16, 2019 22:00
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ashpanash posted:You really think Enrico Fermi didn't understand that? I'm well aware that Enrico Fermi probably understood the nature of this problem, I just disagree with his conclusions. Well, if we interpret his paradox right, as I only have this forum to go on (I've never read anything from Fermi, so this could be the end of a long game of telephone for all I know  )Also please keep in mind my argument, which is no, we shouldn't see anything. And neither should we expect to for a long time. We have no evidence and have just deluded ourselves into believing we have. That part with "too alien" was a throw-away joke I added after my actual argument. That joke was supposed to just add another layer to the argument, not replace it entirely like you somehow thought? But I agree on your last point, the conclusions leading to the Fermi Paradox are indeed flawed. Bug Squash posted:Here's the thing: you're imagining everyone getting started at the same time like it's a 4X game. That's pretty much impossible in practice. How soon could intelligence have started on Earth? Did we really need to spend a billion years as microbes, or 300 million hiding from Dinos? Even once we became Homo sapiens, does it have to take so long to reach technology. Could we skip the dark ages? That argument is one I especially hate. We call that in German "Milchmädchenrechnung" (look it up). How can we look at our own history and the history of our planet with countless dead civilizations who never got to the modern age and all those extinct species and believe a species in space would behave otherwise? I know a species imperative is to multiply and consume as much resources as it can, but sooner or later keeping a space empire together will cost more in resources then it could theoretically generate, after which it will stagnate and finally collapse. Hell, a species theoretically could survive multiple collapses like ours, but that would also mean they would have a huge, but still limited region of space they're living in, not an uncontrolled expansion. If our own history as the only evidence we have turns out to be right, thousands of sapient species getting into space over hundreds of millions of years just means a lot more ruins for us latecomers to find, not that they actually colonize the entire loving universe. This idea that unlimited expansion is possible sounds like another idea from a 4x game actually, so it's kind of ironic that you're doing the same thing you're accusing someone else of DrSunshine posted:Even if it was really rare that a civilization manages to not kill itself, like 1/1,000,000,000, the one civilization that managed not to, would spread across their galaxy in a few million years. No, it really wouldn't. Deepest sigh. I think 4x games were a mistake 
Libluini fucked around with this message at 09:40 on Sep 17, 2019 |
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Sep 17, 2019 09:36
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How keen would this civilisation be to get everyone loving all day long to produce the population needed to expand across the entire galaxy? The current population boom on Earth due to medical advances follows a very consistent pattern: you get the population booming because suddenly masses of people aren't dying in infancy, but then it plateaus because people have contraceptive options and increasingly don't have families of dozens and dozens of kids. Considering that living on a hardscrabble frontier planet is likely to be pretty miserable compared to living on a well-settled world, I think it'd be a bit much to assume that civilisations will scramble to settle as much of the galaxy as they can as quickly as they can. You're not likely to get wave 2 of colonisation until the planet or planets you settled in wave 1 are pretty dang well-established, and unless you dump all your birth control options and procreate like crazy it'll take a good long time for that to happen.
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Sep 17, 2019 10:40
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You're exploring the possible solutions to the Fermi paradox, which is kind of the point of the Fermi paradox. The Fermi paradox sorta acknowledges it's wrong at the start, I don't really get why people get so uptight about that. Anyway, if we assume that empires are impossible in space (quite possible), then what is stopping each individual planet system colonised going on to colonise further planets, leading to exponential growth? If we assume that it's not possible for a living system to survive between stars, what's stopping a much hardier Von Neuman probe system? Even if only 1 in 1000 civilisations decides such a system is a good idea, it quickly leads to galactic saturation. If we come up with answers for those, can we prove them? It's this point - counterpoint feedback that makes Fermi paradox so juicy.
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Sep 17, 2019 11:09
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I just have a hard time believing crashing some robots and embryos on a "habitable" planet is going to lead to a worldwide civilization on that new world. Assuming you can correctly identify a habitable world. And all the systems on board, including those for selecting a landing site, are still fine after possibly hundreds of years of travel. And it doesn't turn out to be inhabited by the deadly bats from Pitch Black.
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Sep 17, 2019 14:18
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Libluini posted:No, it really wouldn't. Deepest sigh. I think 4x games were a mistake I think you're misunderstanding me! There's no need to make a distinction between "currently extant stellar empire" and "long-dead ruin". All that we're concerned about is evidence of a civilization at all. A civilization can still spread across the galaxy and essentially become thousands of separate mini-civilizations. Even if one stagnated and went extinct, there would still be evidence of its having existed. My argument is a probabilistic one. We have approximately 13 billion years, give or take, from when the first stars formed till the present. Stars formed very early in our universe's history - only about 200 million years after the Big Bang! During that immense flow of time, sentient civilizations could have emerged countless times, just in our own galaxy. We should explain why they haven't. Let me frame it like this:
These are what I think of as "sociological arguments", eg. arguments that rely on extending assumptions which may be valid for humanity across the span of all possible other civilizations. But you can't presume anything about all possible minds. My argument is that unless there is a physical law that prevents a civilization from expanding across space, then, assuming that all configurations of civilization are possible (all kinds of motivations, all kinds of organizations, all kinds of histories) and given 13 billion years of time, it should be highly probable that at least one civilization does expand across space. The challenge, then, is to explain why no civilization seems to have done so - to come up with a universalizable law that explains it. The hypothesis that another poster posted a bit earlier in this thread - maybe civilizations require at least one other habitable planet in their system to kick-start it - is a better one along these lines, because of the way that planets tend to clear their orbits. If a civilization arose on one habitable planet in their solar system, it's virtually impossible that there could be another planet in the solar system that the same civilization would find equally habitable, because its most ideal habitat is its own planet, which, by definition, is alone in its orbit. EDIT: Anyway, my point is just that I argue that you can't rely on generalizing or extrapolating human culture and history for your Fermi Paradox solution. Instead, I think you have to push the solution back a few steps to look at something involving how solar systems or planets form, or how advanced sentient life evolves in the first place. Personally, I think the critical, extremely unlikely thing is the evolution of sentient, tool-building, civilization-making life forms. Maybe that one is the one in god knows how many trillions on trillions chance. Think about it! We have had 5 billion years on this earth, and spent 3 billion of it as bacteria. And, through all the 250 or so million years of land-dwelling vertebrate life, sentient tool users only emerged, like, maybe 5 times? And even in human history itself, only the particular H. Sapiens Sapiens ever ended up building empires and civilizations - up till not too long ago, we shared the planet with Neanderthals and Denisovans, who had tools but never took off the way we did. There's got to be something extremely unlikely about how we particularly came about. DrSunshine fucked around with this message at 14:45 on Sep 17, 2019 |
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Sep 17, 2019 14:34
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Nail Rat posted:Like, it's becoming pretty obvious we'll never survive to get anywhere other than Mars if we even get there. I imagine a lot of civilizations that achieve spaceflight would have a similarly short timeframe. Advanced civilization isn't very compatible with not killing your planet with pollution. I don't actually buy this at all. Human civilization has actually taken a very specific path that wasn't in any way necessary. We could have switched to nuclear power much earlier. We never needed to build a car-centric culture. Those were choices made by our civilization and in part dictated by the completely arbitrary order we happened to make certain scientific discoveries. edit- Keep in mind that the photovoltaic effect was discovered before the first coal power plant was ever built.
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Sep 17, 2019 14:36
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There's also the fact that if you've killed off your ecosystem and your species has ended up living in airtight sealed environments with artificial paste for food and your CO2 recycled into oxygen via a big electrochemical plant and whatnot, then you've kind of solved an important subset of the problems involved in sending people out in multi-generational interstellar ships, whilst simultaneously having a major motivation to undertake interplanetary/interstellar colonisation. If anything, wrecking your home environment might be exactly the spur interplanetary settlement needs.
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Sep 17, 2019 15:01
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ashpanash posted:
We have explored 1 planet, Earth, in a galaxy with like 100 billion stars in it lmao. We've looked at 1 grain of sand on a beach, and you're out here declaring that this is definitive proof that there's nobody else. I think you're not fully comprehending just how absolutely, (astronomically  ) big space is.
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Sep 17, 2019 16:08
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Captain Monkey posted:
He understands the space, you're failing to understand the time aspect. It more than undoes the space aspect of the issue. If civilization could get going conservatively over a billion years ago, or launches a Von Neuman system then, and if it's possible in any way to spread between stars, then we should have aliens or probes here already. That means either civilization is absurdly rare, it couldn't start before now, or interstellar travel is all but impossible. Or another reason not considered here.
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Sep 17, 2019 16:31
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Warthur posted:There's also the fact that if you've killed off your ecosystem and your species has ended up living in airtight sealed environments with artificial paste for food and your CO2 recycled into oxygen via a big electrochemical plant and whatnot, then you've kind of solved an important subset of the problems involved in sending people out in multi-generational interstellar ships, whilst simultaneously having a major motivation to undertake interplanetary/interstellar colonisation. "In theory" yes, but also "in theory" no. There's one supposition that complex societies requires exponential increases in surplus labour/energy output to enable the emergence of complex specializations that enable an accumulation of culture and scientific advances which necessitates complex bureaucracies and organizational systems to further these increases in a feedback loop; but if you undercut the foundation of this surplus you lead to an implosion. The Bronze Age Collapse is actually contextually really interested for multiple parts of the themes covered in this thread. We have implicit evidence of the existence of "sea peoples" that arrived and wiped out several prominent bronze age civilizations that had all collapsed extremely suddenly (i.e we know they were burying/storing weapons for later use and then the collapse must have happened so quickly that they never had a chance to go back to retrieve them!) due to a multitude of economic, sociological, and environmental factors and much of the evidence of these civilizations disappeared with them. Complex societies are extremely fragile ones. And that the ability to construct spacecraft for colonization might be forever out of reach of a society on the brink of collapse that's putting all of its surplus efforts into merely staying alive on the ocean floor or something. On the other hand North Korea. So who knows! But the Bronze Age collapse is also really interesting because you can easily imagine a space faring civilization with a mercantalistic trading relationship where its importing resources and exporting tools and finished goods to sparsely populated colonies collapsing in a similar way and those planets, like in the Foundation novels, basically losing all memory that there ever was a "homeworld" or home empire. And we have evidence that the existence of the internet and digital storage of information might not make preserving history any more likely than books. Libluini posted:I'm well aware that Enrico Fermi probably understood the nature of this problem, I just disagree with his conclusions. Well, if we interpret his paradox right, as I only have this forum to go on (I've never read anything from Fermi, so this could be the end of a long game of telephone for all I know IIRC British Whigs also have a certain historical theory about how parliamentary democracy was inevitable for the British Isles etc. However for all discussions of the Fermi Paradox, making certain basic assumptions are kinda necessary for any meaningful discussion to be had, or for any meaningful conclusions to be reached. One of these assumptions if assuming that there are certain steps from dead matter to space faring civilizations; and that civilizations on a basic level all have broadly similar behavior that can be abstracted from biological behavior. I.e all biological lifeforms that we've seen, have the primary goal of reproduction to pass on genes to continue the species; and this is true from fungus to ants. Natural selection and evolution for some reason eventually resulted in human sentience and civilization; but from a broad outside-looking in level, i.e if we wanna Kerning Chameleon it, we're just a really large organism made up of "ants" working communally to do the same thing we always have done, consume, breed, spread. And once we're done with Earth we will want to continue this and not die, we need to go to other planets. It's possible that there be other organisms out there that work on entirely alien to us mechanisms and are impossible to understand and their "culture" also impossibly different and thus impossible to make any useful or decideable theories regarding; this is possible, but also gives us nothing at all to work with!. While on Earth, if you look at all human civilizations, some are expansionist, some were more innovative than others, some were sea faring, and so on and so forth; eventually one of them did something different, and that different thing mattered more and that's how we ended up with the modern history we have now. We just needed one. And that's the basic idea with space and the fermi paradox, is that it just needs one. So either we are the first; yay us. Or we're not, in which case what the gently caress is going on.
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Sep 17, 2019 16:48
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ashpanash posted:Even if we were to find nothing alive right now, if there were any alive before now, and they were widespread, we'd expect to see their debris. Maybe their leftover handiwork in some form. We see nothing that is not entirely consistent with natural forces. Like what? What would you expect to see? Would you expect to see something that physically looks like a space ship? We don't actually fly around the universe looking at things with our eyes. If you mean we'd see some anomalies, then yeah, we see those all the time in every branch of astronomy. We assume they are natural because we are actually super primitive and are not nearly at the stage we can declare something unexplainable, but it's not like we don't see anomalies nonstop about everything.
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Sep 17, 2019 16:58
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People need to watch Life After People. 70,000 years is enough to render all human civilization basically non-existent with only a slight sign of our existence in the geological record in background radiation, plastics, and left over city foundations. A million years would be enough to make it all disappear.
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Sep 17, 2019 17:02
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Raenir Salazar posted:People need to watch Life After People. That works on present day human stuff, on a planet that has extensive erosion and a biosphere constantly burying stuff. A solar system filled with millions of super-large objects in stable orbits or situated on dead planets? Made out of super strong alloys? Those are going to last a long long time. Maybe not forever, but I'd expect a few to stick around.
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Sep 17, 2019 17:15
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Bug Squash posted:That works on present day human stuff, on a planet that has extensive erosion and a biosphere constantly burying stuff. If you're talking about massive objects on a more modest scale, like ruins on a planet or abandoned space stations or something - we've only just, in comparatively recent history, been able to detect the presence of exoplanets at all, and the finest detail we've been able to come up with about them is a broad guess as to what their atmospheres consist of. There could be a Trump Tower on every single exoplanet detected to date and we wouldn't be able to determine its presence using our current techniques.
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Sep 17, 2019 17:24
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Warthur posted:The assumption here being that making Dyson Spheres and similar is cheaper/easier than interstellar colonisation, which seems tenuous to me. (Given the sheer enormity of the surface area of the Dyson Sphere, is there even enough material in the Solar System to make one which wasn't uselessly wafer-thin? If you need to go visit other solar systems to get the material to make your Dyson Sphere anyway, why not just have your excess population settle other solar systems rather than trying to make the Dyson Sphere in the first place?) I think we have 2 definitions of "sphere" in this thread one being not a sphere. There is enough hematite in mercury to build rings around the sun with material to spare
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Sep 17, 2019 17:35
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Raenir Salazar posted:People need to watch Life After People. We have cut up some long standing rocks in ways that won't heal or erode for billions of years. Stuff like cutting off a mountain top for mining will be cut off forever even when it smooths down. But that is the thing, in 10 million years when dogs make their civilization they will never not have known that mountain tops weren't naturally like that, and will have a bunch of theories that are disputed that people don't worry much about day to day, because it will seem to be safe to assume there is natural explanations even if the details are not yet known. That is the hard thing with space stuff, we know so little it's all anomalies still, name nearly any idea about space and there is still major not fully explained exceptions and the right thing to do is assume it all has a good natural explanation and we are just still new at this because jumping to "it's aliens" is stupid, but if something legitimately was aliens, it'd be a long time of us going down the wrong path making natural theory after natural theory trying to patch it before we could say "yeah, this can't be right, an alien might have done it".
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Sep 17, 2019 17:39
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Bug Squash posted:That works on present day human stuff, on a planet that has extensive erosion and a biosphere constantly burying stuff. This is a huuuuuuuuuuuuge if. Without maintenance I'd entirely expect O'Neill cylinders to gradually erode from stellar winds, meteorites, debris, radiation and so on until something makes their orbit unstable enough that they eventually hit something large enough to shatter it or nudge it into the sun. A Dyson sphere most likely would be built out of millions of smaller platforms to reflect sunlight into a receiver (see the earlier youtube channel); without maintenance these I would expect to erode and decay into the sun very quickly. There is I don't think any material we can think of existence that would be totally immune from eventually breaking up and eroding; if we make it like chrome, something else will undo it, there's no singularly perfect material. That's even if such a civilization got to that point before imploding. Any civilization that visited and settled earth countless number of times in the distant geological past might never have had enough time to think it worth it for such structures. Owlofcreamcheese posted:We have cut up some long standing rocks in ways that won't heal or erode for billions of years. Stuff like cutting off a mountain top for mining will be cut off forever even when it smooths down. Eeeeeh, I'm not sure if this is true. Given how mountains are formed I'd expect them to "break up" as fault lines shift.
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Sep 17, 2019 17:42
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:I think we have 2 definitions of "sphere" in this thread one being not a sphere. There is enough hematite in mercury to build rings around the sun with material to spare
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Sep 17, 2019 17:47
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Raenir Salazar posted:Eeeeeh, I'm not sure if this is true. Given how mountains are formed I'd expect them to "break up" as fault lines shift. Some will, some won't. Different areas are renewed at wildly different rates:  We have made lots of geological changes though, if a bunch of future dog scientists a billion years from now had to investigate their earth they would need all sorts of explanations for like all the various minerals concentrating and collecting in places other than where they formed. Even if new york city crumbles to dust and is pulverises to have no recognizable shapes it's still going to have dog people inventing elaborate theories why there is a huge iron deposit there that seems to have a ton of other unrelated minerals and they will probably spend hundreds of years going down the right track explaining why gold forms next to deposits of pulverized gemstone or why plastic (which surely must be natural) forms around elemental silicon. Even if they have been ground down and melted so much you can't see they were once a device. like the geological record will have the walmart layer all around the earth. even if the individual objects are long gone.
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Sep 17, 2019 17:59
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Bug Squash posted:He understands the space, you're failing to understand the time aspect. It more than undoes the space aspect of the issue. I don't fail to understand a thing. We could be sitting on top of a thousand von neumann probes buried a half-mile under the surface and never know it. The moon could be absolutely filled with the remnants of an alien civilization, and we would not be aware. Mars could be harboring an underground civilization of actual, living aliens in a sealed environment and we wouldn't know. And all of this assumes super materials that survive millions of years in a recognizable state, that are of a type that we'd conceive of as artificial, and which can be found on our planet and our IMMEDIATE planetary neighbors. Basically - you don't seem to have any grasp of the scale of things, or just how limited our understanding is, and it shows.
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Sep 17, 2019 18:00
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The sheer nummbr of times Von Neumann probes get presented as proof of interstellar biological spreading when they do not exist is astounding
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Sep 17, 2019 18:07
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Unoriginal Name posted:The sheer nummbr of times Von Neumann probes get presented as proof of interstellar biological spreading when they do not exist is astounding The point is that you can tell the sci-fi story with whatever exact details you want. If something at all can replicate through space it would take over in shockingly small amounts of time. Von neumann probes drawn a particular way are the stand in for whatever details of spore based bacteria or colony ships or hibernation frog aliens or robots or brain uploads or space ants or whatever specific details you like on the story. The general idea is that one guy flying around the galaxy like star trek is fantasy, but something spreading asteroid belt to asteroid belt is pretty attainable technology that someone would need to work out doesn't break any laws of physics. Something that could fly to the next star over in less than 100 years then set up and send something to the next star in 100 years would fill the galaxy in a blink of the eye, however the details shake out.
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Sep 17, 2019 18:17
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You have to be a pretty sociopathic civilization to build a bunch of Von Neumann probes to go build poo poo in other solar systems millions of years from when they're launched, and might not ever get colonized. Likewise, you have to be pretty sociopathic to send automated nurseries full of frozen embryos (or something like that) to go colonize new solar systems without any adults or culture or the ability to communicate with where they came from. What's the motivation of ancient aliens to sperm all over the galaxy? Boredom? Geometric progression is mathematically possible, it's just kind of pointless if you're actually trying to do something useful.
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Sep 17, 2019 18:19
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Unoriginal Name posted:The sheer nummbr of times Von Neumann probes get presented as proof of interstellar biological spreading when they do not exist is astounding What are you talking about? Replication is clearly not impossible, since life can do it. Life isn't magic.
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Sep 17, 2019 18:20
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Infinite Karma posted:You have to be a pretty sociopathic civilization to build a bunch of Von Neumann probes to go build poo poo in other solar systems millions of years from when they're launched, and might not ever get colonized. Likewise, you have to be pretty sociopathic to send automated nurseries full of frozen embryos (or something like that) to go colonize new solar systems without any adults or culture or the ability to communicate with where they came from. What's the motivation of ancient aliens to sperm all over the galaxy? Boredom? You're imagining all aliens have human psychology and biology. Sociopathy, by our standards, might be quite common. It's probably unwise to assume every species in the universe has a human like helpless baby phase, and assuming that no-one is just straight uploading themselves into the robots.
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Sep 17, 2019 18:24
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Infinite Karma posted:You have to be a pretty sociopathic civilization to build a bunch of Von Neumann probes to go build poo poo in other solar systems millions of years from when they're launched, and might not ever get colonized. Likewise, you have to be pretty sociopathic to send automated nurseries full of frozen embryos (or something like that) to go colonize new solar systems without any adults or culture or the ability to communicate with where they came from. What's the motivation of ancient aliens to sperm all over the galaxy? Boredom? Have you met other humans? Have you read the history of colonialization at all? The Conquistadores? A More Serious answer: Perhaps A Sufficiently Advanced Civilization could send probes with enough of an advanced AI to not break down obviously recognizably sentient beings. But this still begs various questions as to how they are defining sentient. A race of sentient ants might not assume sentient life that's made up of billions of wholly sentient individuals could exist. However you think of it; there are plenty of ways a civilization could rationalize sending a self-replicating paper clip optimizer while also believing they took all possible steps to not paperclip optimize sentients into goo; while still possibly missing something that they didn't consider. A lot of things are possible but going "Why would anyone do such a heinous thing ergo it isn't probable" is basically not-getting the question. You just need one civilization to not give a poo poo.
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Sep 17, 2019 18:34
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edit: ^^^ maybe I misspoke. I didn't mean it was immoral and we should assume aliens share our morals. It's just pointless, so it would be expending a lot of effort and resources for nothing. Why would they want a paperclip replicator at all, regardless of whether it ate sentients? Building power plants and data centers around another star doesn't really offer much reward if you can't trade that stuff between stars, unless there are things that are actually scarce in space and dilithium crystals (or whatever) are worth bringing home.Bug Squash posted:You're imagining all aliens have human psychology and biology. Sociopathy, by our standards, might be quite common. It's probably unwise to assume every species in the universe has a human like helpless baby phase, and assuming that no-one is just straight uploading themselves into the robots. If there are aliens who build successor species of robots whose brains can be uploaded and downloaded and copied without decay and death, then all bets are off, but we still haven't found things that are durable enough to do that with fidelity over hundreds or thousands of years, without constant energy input. Infinite Karma fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Sep 17, 2019 |
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Sep 17, 2019 18:40
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Infinite Karma posted:You have to be a pretty sociopathic civilization to build a bunch of Von Neumann probes to go build poo poo in other solar systems millions of years from when they're launched, and might not ever get colonized. Likewise, you have to be pretty sociopathic to send automated nurseries full of frozen embryos (or something like that) to go colonize new solar systems without any adults or culture or the ability to communicate with where they came from. What's the motivation of ancient aliens to sperm all over the galaxy? Boredom? I mean, the point is that it could be any of a million similar more elaborate backstories, with colonies or automated probes or aliens with different morals or different biologies or a weapon or an automated process that runs unattended, or a slow step by step building of a whole world, spending a thousands of years there then independently deciding to colonize some nearby star with no guided plan. It's all just details. None of the sci-fi specifics matters. As long as anything will eventually create another ship in a time scale of thousands of years the actual specific story is just flavor. von neumann probes is basically "anything self replicating will take over" then telling you to imagine that as the simplest possible thing because the details on if it's space free floating asteroid bacteria or super quantum robots is just star trek stuff that doesn't change the core concept and can be talked about separately.
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Sep 17, 2019 18:45
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A von neumann probe is just a very well understood concept, and one that requires the least amount of work for a single civilization starting from a single star, to get across the galaxy. The point of a von neumann probe is that it is basically zero effort past building and testing the first probe and then pointing a fleet of them at a bunch of candidates for exploitation. The basic idea is probably you send a probe controlled by an AI, with a sample of your entire genetic genome stored securely that it then replicates using goo it finds and clones into the first colonists at the destination, presumably raising them/nanny'ing them/teaching them from birth to adulthood to take the first steps to build a new civilization once the world has been either terraformed or if already habitable, once the basic infrastructure to comfortable support their outpost is fully assembled. Once this civilization has gotten large enough and developed enough, presumably it builds its own probes and sends them out at new destinations; cross referencing with any beamed communications sent from the origin star, which in a game of telephone hopefully keeps them from sending probes to already colonized systems (or these probes are smart enough to have an IFF beacon that they are all set to). You could do the same thing with Starship Trooper style bugs sending goo on asteroids using only gravity to accelerate it to the 70,000km/s needed to get the process going or use generational ships that have a crew; but a von neumann probe is basically technology we could in theory macguyver together today and send it out within a decade or so. The entire point is you could start an interstellar civilization with just 21st century tech; it wouldn't be very fanciful and possibly quite boring but it would get the job done. As to why to do this at all? To preserve the species by flinging your genes across the cosmos far and wide; that's it; fulfilling our biological evolutionary prerogative using all of our technology to do so. A Von Neumann Probe is just the bare minimum needed for a hypothetical civilization to spread across the galaxy and under X million years and it sets the stage for the Fermi Paradox because it's the minimum while anything else would just do the same job but faster. All of these settled worlds all become micro-civilizations that each in turn feel motivated to send out probes because their microcivilization is special and unique, and eventually their world will die, and they MUST keep spreading because it would be such a shame if all of their cultural achievements, scientific progress, and history, was lost forever. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 19:01 on Sep 17, 2019 |
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Sep 17, 2019 18:58
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Raenir Salazar posted:but a von neumann probe is basically technology we could in theory macguyver together today and send it out within a decade or so. Well... I think I'd want a reference for that, because it seems like news to me. I got the impression that there are significant engineering challenges to making a self-replicating machine right now.
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Sep 17, 2019 19:40
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The von Neumann probes theory of interstellar colonization sounds easy and feasible, in the same way that magic sounds easy and feasible. Read again all of the poo poo this one self replicating machine is supposed to do. It's ridiculous. Where exactly would we send such a probe right now? Exactly how is it going to raise embryos and teach them enough that they don't die within a generation or so? We don't have any machines even close to capable of either task, let alone staying functional for decades or centuries, and also able to build copies of itself. Also able to communicate across interstellar space and identify habitable planets (we still don't know of a single one, yes they must be out there but they're very hard to find and likely very far away). How do you feed the growing embryos and children if there was no life on the barren rock they land on? To wit, how would you ever detect which "habitable" planets have local flora or fauna that could be consumed safely that would be abel to sustain life, from light years or decades away? Nail Rat fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Sep 17, 2019 |
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Sep 17, 2019 19:46
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Nail Rat posted:
Who said embryos are part of a von Neumann probe? That is just one of a billion ways colonization could work. The point of thinking about von Neumann probes is not worrying the specific details and that ANYTHING self replicating would take over a galaxy very quickly. It doesn't actually matter if it's 500 steps across generations of different probes and machines, if it's a sleek nanobot thing, a colony ship, an embryo ship, robots, AI, or even a bunch of genetically engineered bacteria trying to evolve intelligence from scratch every time. Like you can not worry about those details once you realize that anything that self replicates in any way can do it and would follow the same spread pattern as the simplest possible thing.
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Sep 17, 2019 19:55
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