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DrSunshine posted:This is related to the Great Filter. Personally, I think that there's multiple Great Filters - the biggest of which are the jump to Eukaryotic life, which happened many billions of years ago, and the coming one which is environmental disasters due to the unwitting actions of an immature sapient race. The reason why we do not see any sign of Kardashev level 2+ civilizations out there is, I believe, because we are the first, the Ancient Precursors in sci fi, or that we are the only sapient life in the universe. If there were races before us, we'd already have observed decaying megastructures, stars being lifted, galactic highways, the trails of unimaginably powerful rockets and so on. For whatever reason, we seem to be the only ones around in a dead, lifeless universe. We don’t know what a more advanced civilization values. Many of those megastructures may not be desirable or viable. Though it is neat thinking of Humanity as the wise elves of the galaxy before other life springs up. It’s possible you’re right in general though and there are no other current civilizations in the galaxy. It may very well be that the first intelligent species we meet is one that we create or uplift.
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Aug 3, 2020 15:03
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Zesty posted:Sapience doesn't get selected for easily. That seems not true, dolphins, primates, corvids and squid all do higher reasoning and all of them had that evolve in a pretty similar time frame and each from a different brain structure. It seems like this stuff evolves easily and repeatedly. (like now you say only humans have space ships so only human brains evolved enough, but it seems pretty clear the other animals are at least where earlier humans were with brain development, and it's not like a thing that evolved one time ever with no close analogs at all from some freak one time occurance)
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Aug 3, 2020 18:52
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FFT posted:It would probably just look like 'Oumuamua though. This dumb theory about ancient alien species preferring the colder parts of the universe I brought up in this thread and Oumuamua's latest hypothesis made me think about what kind of entity could evolve in the absolutely cold and dead clouds of failed proto-stars. I'm imagining a process that's both incredibly weird and incredibly slow, and more physical than chemical. Also to explain a bit this new hypothesis, on Scientific American I found an article talking about how Oumuamua probably came from a proto-star system that failed at an even earlier state than a brown dwarf, making the resulting cloud surrounding a barely Jupiter-sized black dwarf extremely cold, but filled with Oumuamua-sized debris. Debris which theoretically could be catapulted out of their weird death cloud and hurled like a projectile around. Or, from another perspective, it could slowly drift outwards, but thanks to the orbital mechanics at work in our galaxy, other stars would be traveling at insanely high speeds towards it, which in turn makes it look like a fast-moving comet entering the system. This would by the way neatly explain why astronomers could follow Oumuamua's vector back to what apparently is just an empty stretch of space in between other stars. That stretch isn't empty, instead that seemingly empty space is where Oumuamua's death cloud home must be. (As extremely cold and dark objects are an incredible bitch to find, even close by. So we just can't see it.) On the other hand, we could still be utterly, bafflingly wrong. Right now the astronomic community expects to find a lot more of those Oumumua-like objects as the working hypothesis means there should be tons of those super-failures around to spit them out. Here's the article in question, for those interested.
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Aug 3, 2020 18:54
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:That seems not true, dolphins, primates, corvids and squid all do higher reasoning and all of them had that evolve in a pretty similar time frame and each from a different brain structure. It seems like this stuff evolves easily and repeatedly. It does seem to evolve multiple times, but the unique confluence that humans put together of: long-lived, eusocial, linguistic, tool-using, and sapient -- seems pretty rare, and strikes me as the necessary thing for technological intelligence.
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Aug 3, 2020 19:08
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To me it depends on if the universe is (broadly) homogeneous and if the conditions required for the evolution of intelligent life are homogeneous; both are obviously absolutely wide open questions. The former I’m more confident in saying probably yes, the latter is impossible to know without either a hard proof from some combination of physics, chemistry and biology and/or a detailed survey of the entire universe. If you assume yes to both then it seems probable that life and intelligence develop at broadly the same pace in-line with other natural processes such as something like stellar metallicity. It could therefore be probable that there would be many earth-like civilisations also developing at the same rate as we are; some ahead and some behind but with an epochal ‘beginning’ which we may be very close to. One of the podcasts that got posted in here described the wow! signal as somebody else’s Arecibo message and I like that kind of symmetry of a galaxy absolutely teeming with adolescent intelligent (and quasi-humanoid) life all waiting to say hello. What I don’t like is the story above is heavily abusing an anthropic bias to say that the only form of intelligent life possible is biologically similar to our own, we have basically no evidence to make such an incredibly strong claim and without it all bets are off regarding the duration needed to evolve intelligent life and the above story collapses. My main issue with the Fermi paradox generally is it sort of smuggles the conclusions into the premise with the ‘where are they’ insofar as it assumes we’d know. We know vanishingly little about our own solar system; Pluto wasn’t accurately imaged until 2015; of the five closest stars to Sol the third and fourth were discovered in 2014 and 2015 respectively. We also know that without exotic physics--or at least physics significantly beyond our capability-- marshalling the amounts of energy required to create a passive beacon would require a civilisation significantly more advanced than us; it also seems probable that such a civilisation would use the cutting edge technology available to them rather than dusting off a piece of technology from a past era (more or less at random to them); our current SETI efforts could well be analogous to an uncontacted tribe gazing at contrails. To come full circle and abuse the anthropic principle again, if ‘human-like’ life does have an epoch determined by natural processes then older types of intelligent life may be radically distinct from our assumptions. You can consult sci-fi for as much inspiration as you want here but if advanced intelligent life was radically different either in scale or habitation from humans then you can reset every single assumption as to what a techno-signature looks like. Something that had evolved in hard vacuum environment for example might prefer to live a long way from stars, rather than close to them; our own solar system could be teeming with another civilisation and we might not know it. Mainly the thing I come back to again and again, is space is absolutely vast, we’ve been looking for a tiny amount of time using very primitive tools and we’ve already had one semi-plausible candidate for a signal of technological origin. I really don’t see any reason to start worrying about great filters etc. just because we can’t see anyone, most of the time we barely know what we’re looking at.
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Aug 3, 2020 19:39
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FFT posted:It would probably just look like 'Oumuamua though. I really like Oumuamua, not because i think it was anything other than a dumb rock but because it was a dumb rock and we only just saw it. Something marginally faster, intelligently piloted, less reflective etc. and we'd have absolutely no chance. There could be a bunch of these things and we'd never see them.
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Aug 3, 2020 19:43
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Libluini posted:This dumb theory about ancient alien species preferring the colder parts of the universe I brought up in this thread and Oumuamua's latest hypothesis made me think about what kind of entity could evolve in the absolutely cold and dead clouds of failed proto-stars. That's basically Niven's Outsiders, unless I'm missing the joke.
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Aug 3, 2020 20:20
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DrSunshine posted:It does seem to evolve multiple times, but the unique confluence that humans put together of: long-lived, eusocial, linguistic, tool-using, and sapient -- seems pretty rare, and strikes me as the necessary thing for technological intelligence. With a sample size of one pretty much anything is going to be rare. But in evolution it seems like making eukaryotic cells was extremely rare, where it took over a billion years to happen and only happened once. Intelligence seems to have evolved to different levels a dozen times totally independently over the last million years. like I'm smarter than a crow or an elephant, but in evolutionary terms it's not like they missed by a ton. If humans never happened there is a ton of almost rans that would have continued to evolve.
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Aug 3, 2020 20:54
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Zesty posted:Sapience doesn't get selected for easily. Life may have started right away, but it took a LONG time before we came along. There may not be enough time for Earth life to get space-faring if we don't cut it. The time between us and a shrew is far shorter than the time between life being unicellular sludge and life becoming complex. Most of the work has already been done
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Aug 3, 2020 21:03
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Rappaport posted:That's basically Niven's Outsiders, unless I'm missing the joke. Not really. I just skimmed the article, but those Outsiders still need sunlight, so they're definitely not a lifeform which could exist around a black dwarf. I was thinking more about something really exotic, like a lifeform based on extremely cold hydrogen crystals, for example.
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Aug 3, 2020 21:04
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We might be among the earliest life but reading into it I'm less convinced. Earth is only 4.5 billion years old and life is pretty much that old (give or take many millions of years) , so it happened very rapidly after the planet formed. It then took a longass time to become complex life, but once it did it rather rapidly made everything we see today including us. The milky way is about 9 billion years old, meaning it has had life for half it's galactic lifespan already, but there are galaxies considerably older. Humanity could have already have evolved and gone extinct with a decent 4 billion year leeway already. E: why we haven't met anyone yet is just space being insanely large and time being incredibly long. But that's also what makes the existence of other intelligent life almost a certainty we just will probably never meet them. Intelligence isn't magic, it doesn't break light speed.
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Aug 3, 2020 21:27
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It's kind of a bummer that we're essentially limited to the Milky Way as far as looking for meaningful information about other civilizations. If every galaxy had even one civilization, there would be a trillion or more, but aside from some very ambiguous signals that we'd see if they started galaxy-level engineering projects, we're not going to be learning much about them.
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Aug 3, 2020 22:00
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DrSunshine posted:It does seem to evolve multiple times, but the unique confluence that humans put together of: long-lived, eusocial, linguistic, tool-using, and sapient -- seems pretty rare, and strikes me as the necessary thing for technological intelligence. It's this. These videos talk about this kind of thing and they're quite good. Uplifting Pt 1, by Isaac Arthur Uplifting Pt 2, by JMG Dolphins are cool and all, but they need slightly better brains, grow some grasping appendages, and to get out of the goddamned ocean before they can start basic metallurgy, let alone spaceflight. Evolution just doesn't seem to select for what we got. Except that one time. Zesty fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Aug 3, 2020 |
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Aug 3, 2020 23:32
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Evolution selected for a big grey mushy metaphorical joke-telling peacock tail and technology is an accidental, unpleasant side-effect of that.
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Aug 4, 2020 01:15
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also why does any given civilisation want to leave the planet? we obviously do because we're gonna suck this place dry and keep multiplying but thats part of our human psychology imho a lot of theorising around aliens is just assuming that things will be like science fiction so trying to make materialist explanations for why the aliens will have to invent rayguns and rocketships and robots and dyson spheres its sorta vaguely related imo to how a lot of the tech billionaire types get obsessed with trying to make science fiction things from books reality, without thinking about how real life is not fiction and works differently, and how they are going to affect the real world we live in
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Aug 5, 2020 12:27
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Communist Thoughts posted:also why does any given civilisation want to leave the planet? Honestly, it made a lot more sense during the Cold War. The gist was, a given sapient species will first expand to dominate the eco-sphere around it, and then as the arms race inevitably heats up (by MAD logic), some portions of the species would want to take control of the space surrounding their planet, and then beyond, so that "the other guy" doesn't get there first. Of course the inverse, if we're picking sci-fi tropes let's take the dog people from Heinlein for instance, who are happy basically just sitting around on their planet, we would never hear from those dudes, and most likely they wouldn't pick up the phone even if we tried to call. So it's a sort of self-selecting problem, the only aliens we could hope to meet would have to be brutes like we humans are, because that's what drives expansion into space. Of course we can imagine peaceful space-faring cultures, like say the Pierson's Puppeteers, but they had other materialist problems that drove them to space colonization. A completely non-materialistic culture is in its own way an answer to Fermi's dilemma, since they would be too pre-occupied with navel-gazing exercises to bother with the rest of the cosmos. This isn't to say our own exercises are inherently any better, just that they're more likely to lead to any sort of detection or contact scenario, and vice versa for any alien species.
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Aug 5, 2020 12:50
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This all flies out the window if you look beyond the Anglophile world, as I've read both German and Russian SF which assumes a peaceful union coming first, followed by peaceful exploration and colonization second.
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Aug 5, 2020 13:21
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Libluini posted:This all flies out the window if you look beyond the Anglophile world, as I've read both German and Russian SF which assumes a peaceful union coming first, followed by peaceful exploration and colonization second. Yes I’ve also seen Star Trek.
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Aug 5, 2020 14:32
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Libluini posted:This all flies out the window if you look beyond the Anglophile world, as I've read both German and Russian SF which assumes a peaceful union coming first, followed by peaceful exploration and colonization second. lol way to make all anglophone lit one thing and all non-anglophone lit all the same. there is a lot on both sides. ST has peaceful first contact. one of the most popular SF books to come out of china ever deals with this very thing, and they are not friendly.
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Aug 5, 2020 14:36
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This was more meant as an answer to Rappaport's Cold War theory of SF, also thanks for reminding me of that Chinese author. I have literary never heard of Chinese SF before him and have often wondered what Chinese SF must be like. (I think my dumb brain always assumed they must be like those Soviet stories and therefore I find it hard to remember that they're not included in "Russian SF")
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Aug 5, 2020 15:39
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Turns out (of course!) John Michael Godier did an event horizon episode on climate change as a great filter candidate. I think it's relevant to this thread's last couple pages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTZgsuXfRYU
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Aug 5, 2020 16:13
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Libluini posted:This was more meant as an answer to Rappaport's Cold War theory of SF, also thanks for reminding me of that Chinese author. I have literary never heard of Chinese SF before him and have often wondered what Chinese SF must be like. (I think my dumb brain always assumed they must be like those Soviet stories and therefore I find it hard to remember that they're not included in "Russian SF") to be honest i found the bits about the cultural revolution more interesting than the sci-fi, which to me says i should do some history reading. parts of it feel very Party line which is chafing. i'm really struggling to get through the second book.
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Aug 5, 2020 16:22
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Communist Thoughts posted:also why does any given civilisation want to leave the planet? maybe i'm blinded by the ideology of our era but i find the idea of a universe full of intelligent life all just looking happily inward really really weird. i've no real evidence, but i feel like curiosity is fundamental component of intelligence and that's going to drive some exploratory impulse you're right that 90% of sci-fi is just WWII in space and this has consciously or otherwise flowed down into a lot of our serious thinking of what the future/aliens will be like
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Aug 5, 2020 16:29
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Rustybear posted:maybe i'm blinded by the ideology of our era but i find the idea of a universe full of intelligent life all just looking happily inward really really weird. Once we have holodecks or gigabit brain ports for vr to help us jerk off, we're done looking at space.
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Aug 5, 2020 16:37
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:Once we have holodecks or gigabit brain ports for vr to help us jerk off, we're done looking at space. We didn’t even need that. We just needed television and unnecessary 40-hour 5-day work weeks doing nothing of value. It’s super easy to distract a species from space.
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Aug 5, 2020 17:19
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Communist Thoughts posted:also why does any given civilisation want to leave the planet? There's only a finite amount of resources on our planet and as technology develops to make extracting resources from outer space cheaper than it is to extract from deeper in the Earth or through chemical wizardry to get it from 0.000000001% yields from ocean water the more we'll move our industrial and extraction industry into space. As our energy demands continue to increase the more we'll have to look for solutions to meet that demand. Our energy consumption has increased 22 times from what it was 100 years ago, and will be like 100 times by the end of this century, that isn't sustainable on just one planet. There are real specific reasons why a civilization must go into space and eventually expand to other stars. It comes down to breeding and reproduction first on a biological level and then on a societal level.
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Aug 5, 2020 18:01
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It's like Factorio all over again. The planet must expand to meet the needs of the expanding planet.
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Aug 5, 2020 18:04
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Praxis Prion posted:It's like Factorio all over again. The planet must expand to meet the needs of the expanding planet. Yes but also capitalism; factorio and games like Anno are more like socialism simulators.
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Aug 5, 2020 18:07
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mediaphage posted:to be honest i found the bits about the cultural revolution more interesting than the sci-fi, which to me says i should do some history reading. parts of it feel very Party line which is chafing. i'm really struggling to get through the second book. It is a weird series and I dunno enough about China to know if it was party line or simply Conservative but I know what you mean. There's this constant undercurrent that very intelligent people run every country or org as best they can but are constantly lead astray by their illiterate masses. Iirc in the final book humanity gives a young woman leader a chance and it goes extremely poorly indeed. There were some interesting ideas though, each book is very different.
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Aug 5, 2020 19:04
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It's weird that China won't allow stories with ghosts in them but is ok with aliens. Doesn't the Party know that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?
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Aug 5, 2020 19:41
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:Once we have holodecks or gigabit brain ports for vr to help us jerk off, we're done looking at space. I know the joke, but in truth I highly suspect that ain't gonna happen. There will always be this nagging feeling that stuff like holodecks and VR aren't real, so only a minority will be satisfied with sarcophaging themselves like creepy cyber-mummies
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Aug 5, 2020 19:52
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Libluini posted:sarcophaging themselves like creepy cyber-mummies What if it turns out that we're the Necrons??! 
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Aug 5, 2020 19:57
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:It's weird that China won't allow stories with ghosts in them but is ok with aliens. Doesn't the Party know that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic? The people responsible for the ghost-ban probably think ghosts are real and therefore a threat, but alien's aren't, so they don't care How extensive is the ban, by the way? Are the Ghostbusters-movies also banned, or are they re-written to feature aliens?
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Aug 5, 2020 20:01
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Libluini posted:The people responsible for the ghost-ban probably think ghosts are real and therefore a threat, but alien's aren't, so they don't care I mean there's a lot of anime that involves ghosts that presumably get made or air in China so I don't think it's super consistent or across the board.
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Aug 5, 2020 20:19
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Libluini posted:The people responsible for the ghost-ban probably think ghosts are real and therefore a threat, but alien's aren't, so they don't care As of like four years ago, Ghostbusters was not allowed according to colleagues of mine who were studying abroad in the US from China. They said that ghost stories were permissible if the ghosts were revealed to be illusions created by technology or other trickery.
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Aug 5, 2020 20:33
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A lot of stuff that western companies censor in China is done preemptively by the companies to prevent the review board from holding up the projects to either give Chinese competing products an advantage or just out of spite or anything else.
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Aug 5, 2020 20:39
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Ghosts and skeletons are both banned I believe. Are there any rules (official or otherwise) surrounding depictions of witchcraft, sorcery, magic, fortune telling, etc?
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Aug 5, 2020 20:47
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Raenir Salazar posted:There's only a finite amount of resources on our planet and as technology develops to make extracting resources from outer space cheaper than it is to extract from deeper in the Earth or through chemical wizardry to get it from 0.000000001% yields from ocean water the more we'll move our industrial and extraction industry into space. As our energy demands continue to increase the more we'll have to look for solutions to meet that demand. Our energy consumption has increased 22 times from what it was 100 years ago, and will be like 100 times by the end of this century, that isn't sustainable on just one planet. There are real specific reasons why a civilization must go into space and eventually expand to other stars. It comes down to breeding and reproduction first on a biological level and then on a societal level. That's not necessarily a given. A lot of our increase in energy usage has been from widescale availability of power, and a global increase in living standards. In the US at least per-capita energy usage is less now than it was in the 1990's. That isn't to say that if cheap, abundant, clean power was available we wouldn't find ways to use it, and there are lots of positives it would bring, but a need for it isn't necessarily inevitable.
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Aug 6, 2020 01:41
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Senor Tron posted:That's not necessarily a given. A lot of our increase in energy usage has been from widescale availability of power, and a global increase in living standards. In the US at least per-capita energy usage is less now than it was in the 1990's. On the other hand if we look at the graph here: https://ourworldindata.org/energy there's currently no sign of consumption slowing down. We see tiny dips during recessions; around over half of the world doesn't have the same standard of living of the top 10%; I imagine it isn't just personal consumption here but also large scale industrial processes. Which would likely continue to increase even if many of us shifted to a more renewable style of living. "from a widescale availability" feels like a weird way of putting it, like it's somehow a chicken and egg sort of thing, but I think the truth is the demand is always there, prior to the internal combustion engine or even prior to electricity we used energy in whatever ways we could and the moment another better means of providing energy showed itself we jumped at it. If nuclear fusion was cracked tomorrow our energy usage would further skyrocket as a result. The fact is though we as a society are clearly consuming a lot of resources, and even if we as a world went pedal to the metal tomorrow to fight climate change we'd still be consumer a lot even if we were trying to be as green as possible about it, and the finite resources of the Earth's crust would make that increasingly more expensive to the point that it basically self-funds ventures to find cheap sources and ways to outsource and offshore those costs; especially if we actually straight up taxed industries on their carbon footprint to the point they decided that factories in orbit/on the moon/on Mars was cheaper in the long run.
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Aug 6, 2020 02:21
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Energy consumption probably won't be 100 times what it was 100 years ago by the end of the century because there'll be less than 2 billion people on the planet. It's easy to think that all life would evolve in the same way we did, the fact that the things that let us survive on the African Savannah for so long (keeping an eye out for ourselves at the expense of others who aren't related to us and not worrying about the future beyond what we can see in the next few weeks) are the same things that led us to destroy the planet once we had the opportunity. I don't know if those same things would necessarily evolve in another scientifically intelligent civilization or not, there's not really any available data to compare us to. Since evolution through natural selection is the only way we have to understand how organisms are brought into existence, it could just be a universal truth that no species can escape its planet.
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Aug 6, 2020 02:22
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