The case for globalism

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A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

Kilroy posted:

If there are many alien species with technological capability even moderately exceeding our own, they are certainly showing - without exception - a great deal of restraint as they go about their business.

Isn't there a decent chance the signals emanating from our solar system indicating intelligent life just turn into background noise at relatively limited (on the cosmic scale) distance? Which would of course also apply to any aliens out there.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2016 14:49

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 00:54

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

Kilroy posted:

It's not even just signals - if there were Kardashev type-III civilizations out there you would expect to see some evidence of it. And I mean literally see, with a telescope looking at the visible spectrum of light. A supernova from a star that shouldn't have supernova'd according to our understanding of stellar physics, a sequence alteration out of no where of some star, celestial objects putting shitloads of energy at certain frequencies but missing the corresponding energy signature at other frequencies that you would expect from natural phenomena, and so on.

Same goes to a more limited extent for type-II civilizations, for that matter.

To be fair we haven't looked that hard even within our own galaxy. But, we have looked hard enough that if intelligent life were anything other than really incredibly rare, and perhaps even unique to Earth, then we should have seen something by now.

I think type II/III civilizations are a bit beyond simply "moderately exceeding our own".

# ¿ Aug 21, 2016 16:00

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

Kilroy posted:

The leap from type-I to type-II is not that great in the sense that it is merely a matter of technological achievement. It's not farfetched at all to think we'll get there in 500 years - perhaps much sooner - and even on the scale of human history that is certainly a moderate amount of time. On the scale of real history it's not even worth thinking about, of course.

I don't think using time as the scale makes much sense for a discussion of technological achievement, at least not a linear one if you do. I mean, the capabilities of humanity over the last 100 years seems to have grown much faster than they did the previous 100, which themselves saw greater change than the 100 previous to that. You also compare those 500 years to all of human history, but if we compare to for example to the start of the scientific revolution, we have just as long to go as we've already passed, or in the case of the industrial revolution, twice as long to go, before considering whether the rate of change of those last 500 years might not be faster than the first 500/250 years.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2016 16:51

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

radmonger posted:

One thing a lot of discussion of the Drake equation get wrong is that they assume the average lifetime of a civilisation is a few hundred years.

However, while there are speculative ideas about nuking the Sun,, the harsh reality is that there are no known technological way to destroy civilisation so thoroughly it doesn't rebuild in a few hundred years. Nuclear war, global warming or a bioengineered plague never kill everyone; 99.99% mortality is a blip on a graph on a large enough scale. 100% never happens by accident.

So one of the most plausible long term futures is an endless drunken walk between the 17th to 21st C.

You're ignoring something kinda big; fossil fuels. What is the basis for another industrial revolution, when you already stripped the most easily accessibly/usable fuels the first/second/third time around? You're not going to be creating a nuke-making civilization on wood alone. Seems more likely that society would just end up stuck on the cusp of industrialization, a really really long 18th century.

# ¿ Aug 24, 2016 20:06

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

Ytlaya posted:

There's also the fact that even if it took a long time to physically build civilization back up, the information would probably still exist, vastly cutting the amount of time necessary to redevelop. People probably wouldn't have to reinvent how to build a nuclear power plant, for example.

radmonger posted:

Lack of fossil fuels, when they eventually run out on Civilisation 10.0 or something, would change things somewhat. It'd be hard to mine uranium with a pick axe. But i don't see why you couldn't build a small hydro plant or windmill manually and then expand from there. Plus 9 catastrophes out of 10 there would be at least one country left with a working power plant.

Solar, wind, probably seawater uranium are not going to run out until the Sun leaves the main sequence.(5 billion years or so).

Ignoring that the original idea was "a drunken walk between the 17th and 21st century", which to me implies erasing the progress of those centuries at the end of each cycle, there are still some issues you have to deal with in a scenario where 21st century civilization survives the initial catastrophe in spots:

Surviving power plants:
- You need specialized knowledge to run and maintain a power plant, as well a supply chain.
- You need motivation to run that power plant.
- You need an educational system that can maintain the knowledge required to keep the plant running.

Recreating nuclear/solar/large scale water power
- Modern manufacturing is the result of a long process of continuing improvements in metallurgy, chemistry, and so on, building on previous knowledge. What happens if parts of large chunks of that knowledge gets taken out?
- Similarly, you need the right machine tools to manufacture other machine tools to manufacture other machine tools to manufacture the specialized equipment/components you need.
- You, once again, need an educational system to maintain the knowledge required to recreate these technologies.

The educational system here is of course reliant on a generally stable, prosperous and populous society, able to produce enough food that people can devote year after year to preserve the knowledge required to maintain what remains and hopefully rebuild. A system that could be very vulnerable to random catastrophes, or people forgetting why something was important because the dude who used to do it just did it without comment for years until he went and got run over by a truck, leading to more and more systems coming offline, diverting attention away from rebuilding into basic questions of survival. Should basic stuff like sanitation come off line, you'd suddenly be faced with recurrent epidemics which encourage people to spread out (or it just thins them out), which would basically be a death blow to any effort to maintain civilization.

The scenario where the world reverts to the 17th century is the same, except no knowledge is maintained except that which exists in books, which will be preserved to varying degrees, or digital media, which could become unreadable very quickly.

radmonger posted:

The 18C led inexorably to the 19th; it seems to really take some kind of motivated reasoning to imagine it could ever continue indefinitely. On the plus side, 5 billion years is enough time for a large enough statistical sample of civilisations that you can be confident every population group will get their fair share of time having a go on the Maxim gun.

It only seems that way because that's what happened historically. If there were no fossil fuels to fuel the industrial revolution, the 19th century is stillborn. That doesn't mean the civilization can't still develop, but it could be at a much slower pace, and go in a very different direction.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2016 16:15

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 00:54

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

Ytlaya posted:

Actually, now that I think of it, such a scenario might be worse than the 17th century in many ways. In the 17th century we still had very large, advanced societies. If you gave people in the actual 17th century access to all modern knowledge, it would vastly jumpstart things (because you had pretty sophisticated industries/supply chains to supply raw materials and at least some sort of scientific community). But in the case of some sort of apocalypse, you might end up with a bunch of disconnected villages and far less manpower, which would make implementing the fruits of future knowledge far more difficult.

So I don't really think it can be compared to any point in time, because you wouldn't have any civilization to speak of (which is like going back literally thousands of years) but the people who exist are likely to be far more educated/literate.

Yeah, the whole "apocalypse" thing is really important. You might have some areas that could cobble together something akin to a 17th century interconnected state, but even those areas would probably be interspersed with the burnt out remains of manufacturing and educational centers, leaving basically designer crops as one of the few immediately usable fruits of industrial civilization. You could have a situation where all the information you need exists, but it exists in chunks across a continent, which you'd need to bring together, and you'd ideally need to do this while you still have people around that have first hand experience with the stuff in the first place. As Kilroy points out, specialized knowledge can disappear surprisingly quickly, and in this case you're racing against the clock while disease and famines rocks society, Hell, just a gap of a single generation in education, and you suddenly have a society which will be very hard pressed to carry on an intellectual tradition.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2016 17:51

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