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The great filter is nuclear weapons, because as soon as a civilization discovers them a nuclear war breaks out fairly quickly, sending the civilizations on the planet back to the stone age. Eventually civilization bounces back, only to rediscover nuclear weapons and go right back to the stone age with another nuclear war. Rinse and repeat until there is no more nuclear material on the planet. At that point there is no more nuclear war, but civilization also can't build nuclear-pulse propelled rockets to colonize the galaxy, so they are stuck on their planet forever. It also neatly explains the lack of lithium-7 in the universe, since the planet's lithium supply would be used in the production of nuclear weapons. And we haven't detected any alien electromagnetic radiation because there are still a relatively small amount of habitable planets in the galaxy and we haven't scanned enough of the sky yet to discover them.
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Nov 29, 2018 18:56
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Adar posted:For the same reason, the simplest and possibly single most probable take on why we've seen nothing unusual is that everyone is hiding from everyone else. Right and I thought that (end spoilers for a book I haven't read) The 3BP plot revolves around us getting discovered by one of those conqueror races and they're comin' for us. The way we solve it is by threatening to blow up the earth in such a way that it reveals the aggressors' location to anyone in the galaxy watching, presumably a bigger fish.. If you plan on reading the book I'd not mouse over, and not worry about answering me.
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Nov 29, 2018 18:58
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zoux posted:Right and I thought that (end spoilers for a book I haven't read) The 3BP plot revolves around us getting discovered by one of those conqueror races and they're comin' for us. The way we solve it is by threatening to blow up the earth in such a way that it reveals the aggressors location to anyone in the galaxy watching. If you plan on reading the book I'd not mouse over, and not worry about answering me. oh I only read the first one - that definitely makes sense as a book 3 solution. yeah, on a galactic scale or higher this is pretty much it.
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Nov 29, 2018 19:01
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qkkl posted:Eventually civilization bounces back, only to rediscover nuclear weapons and go right back to the stone age with another nuclear war. This is one of my Earth-related anxieties, I don't think industrial civilization would bounce back, at least on Earth. We've used up all the oil that's easy to access and I'm skeptical that we could make the leap to a second industrial revolution if we had to start from scratch.
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Nov 29, 2018 19:03
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qkkl posted:
What is "alien electromagnetic radiation" though? It's not like it'd glow green and have extra eyes or something. We currently detect all sorts of electromagnetic radiation we don't know what the heck it is, but by virtue of not knowing what it is we are far from being able to even sort out if any of it even was anything.
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Nov 29, 2018 19:11
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Kerning Chameleon posted:I love how your post can literally be boiled down to "Okay, BUT WHAT IF everything physicists have observed about our universe so far is 100% wrong and my favorite pulp fiction comic is right? What then, smartie pants?!?" Lightning Knight posted:Please be respectful, I expect that this topic should be less controversial and high blood pressure inducing than your average D&D affair.
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Nov 29, 2018 19:14
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Any galactic civilization, far more likely than not, would still be incredibly energetic, giving off heat radiation, radio waves, etc. Even if we can't see what they are building, doing, or saying, there would be tons of evidence that things are doing stuff. It's kind of why "dark forest" solutions to the Fermi Paradox don't really work, because by the time you realize that there might be consequences to the information your civilization is sending out into the universe you have already sent out a fuckton of it.
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Nov 29, 2018 19:21
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MSDOS KAPITAL posted:That's... not really what I said at all, and since your post isn't really worth bothering with a cogent reply I'll just quote the OP instead: LK clearly doesn't comprehend what will happen as more posters realize just how imminent the Great Filter is in regards to our own civilization. 
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Nov 29, 2018 19:23
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:What is "alien electromagnetic radiation" though? It's not like it'd glow green and have extra eyes or something. Radiation that has complex patterns in it. For example digital human radio signals are usually divided into chunks.
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Nov 29, 2018 19:24
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On the general timespan of the universe, I think once humans go beyond this solar system, we're going to find a lot of ruins and monuments scattered out there.
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Nov 29, 2018 19:25
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Ytlaya posted:I can pretty confidently say that simple life is virtually guaranteed to be extremely common, to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if it even exists elsewhere in our solar system. Complex life is trickier, because it took a very long time to develop on our own planet, and when you're talking about time periods on the order of "billions of years" the universe is actually pretty young. There's also the fact that, IIRC, a lot of the heavier elements necessary for life as we know it to exist didn't exist for the first couple generations of stars, limiting the time frame further.
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Nov 29, 2018 19:26
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thegalagakid posted:On the general timespan of the universe, I think once humans go beyond this solar system, we're going to find a lot of ruins and monuments scattered out there. That's adorable, you still believe in Asimovian fairy tales of human existence extended beyond the Oort Cloud. Don't worry, dear, one day I'm sure you'll realize the situation you described in that post is exactly as realistic as the literal events of Lord of the Rings. 
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Nov 29, 2018 19:29
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Kerning Chameleon posted:That's adorable, you still believe in Asimovian fairy tales of human existence extended beyond the Oort Cloud. Don't worry, dear, one day I'm sure you'll realize the situation you described in that post is exactly as realistic as the literal events of Lord of the Rings. Prove I'm wrong, or that you're right.
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Nov 29, 2018 19:40
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qkkl posted:Radiation that has complex patterns in it. For example digital human radio signals are usually divided into chunks. Like, if there was other aliens in our solar system right this second or something maybe. Otherwise there is tons of anomalyous radio activity, fast radio bursts and the space roar, holes in the background radiation, tons of stuff. and none of that is aliens, but the fact our understanding is so bad means we can't even search for most types of deviations. Like we are not at the point we can look at a quasar radio pulse and say "well clearly if this is 18% off then that means aliens changed it". that is absurd at this point. we need rock solid knowledge of things before we can even know what is artificial.
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Nov 29, 2018 19:45
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Kerning Chameleon posted:That's adorable, you still believe in Asimovian fairy tales of human existence extended beyond the Oort Cloud. Don't worry, dear, one day I'm sure you'll realize the situation you described in that post is exactly as realistic as the literal events of Lord of the Rings. What are you doing with your life that "gonna call this woman dear and dismiss her" is a normal reaction for this (is the poster a woman? or are you also trying to call someone a woman as an insult?)
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Nov 29, 2018 19:47
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axeil posted:What about von Neumann probes? They also have to pay the costs of operating in space. Robots are as susceptible to radiation and general entropy as anything else.
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Nov 29, 2018 19:48
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nvm i regret greatly having posted in d&d
Dongattack fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Nov 29, 2018 |
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Nov 29, 2018 19:52
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:What are you doing with your life that "gonna call this woman dear and dismiss her" is a normal reaction for this (is the poster a woman? or are you also trying to call someone a woman as an insult?) It was meant more in the "an adult addressing an adorably wrong child" sort of way, I apologise if any misogyny was inferred by my statements.
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Nov 29, 2018 19:52
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Kerning Chameleon posted:It was meant more in the "an adult addressing an adorably wrong child" sort of way, I apologise if any misogyny was inferred by my statements. If you want to disagree, that's fine, but you were being reductive and arrogant, which is the general theme of your posts here, and misogynist to boot (I am not a woman, but that wouldn't have changed your insult).
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Nov 29, 2018 20:03
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Kerning Chameleon posted:That's adorable, you still believe in Asimovian fairy tales of human existence extended beyond the Oort Cloud. Don't worry, dear, one day I'm sure you'll realize the situation you described in that post is exactly as realistic as the literal events of Lord of the Rings. Be nice, Kerning. This thread is fun! Don’t ruin it for everyone else. Also I said this in USPOL but my favorite version of the Fermi solution is the idea that there is a galactic scale apex predator or even multiple that effectively grooms and factory farms spacefaring civilizations. Major examples in video games include Dead Space and Mass Effect. It’s a very unlikely solution realistically speaking but it’s poetic in that we never consider how say, cows and other livestock creatures think about human civilization, just like a galactic scale apex predator species wouldn’t care what we think.
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Nov 29, 2018 20:19
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Adar posted:If you're a sufficiently unified and late stage civ, I think the answer is that you pick a planet, build a big shell around it, put giant thrusters on it and sail off away from the galaxy into the deepest, darkest corner of space possible, trusting the unlikelihood of anyone checking that exact region for the next few trillion years. The only way to compete in a game like that is to remove yourself from the board and make sure no one ever finds you. Some people like to turtle, others take a more aggressive approach... Spoilers for The Killing Star In the late 21st century Earth is at peace. Humans now command self-replicating machines that create engineering marvels on enormous scales. Artificial habitats dot the solar system. Anti-matter driven Valkyrie rockets carry explorers to the stars at nearly the speed of light. All seems well. Then, from the uncaring black of space come swarms of relativistic missiles. Though they are merely boulder-sized hunks of metal, they move fast enough to hit with the force of many nuclear arsenals. They are impossible to track and impossible to stop. Humanity is all but wiped out by the horrific bombardment. A handful of survivors desperately struggle to escape the alien mop-up fleet. They hide close to the sun, inside asteroids, beneath the crusts of moons, within ice rings, and in the fathomless depths of interstellar space. But most are hunted down and slaughtered. The last man and woman on Earth are captured as zoo specimens. In the belly of an alien starship, a squid-like being relates to them the pitiless logic behind human-kind's execution: the moment humans learned to travel at relativistic speeds was the moment mankind simply became too dangerous a neighbor to have around. Nothing personal. Now you could argue that this is just asking for trouble, but in this proposed 'game' there's no guaranteed winning move.
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Nov 29, 2018 20:22
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Lightning Knight posted:Be nice, Kerning. This thread is fun! Don’t ruin it for everyone else. Check out the Revelation Space books. It'd be nice if it was because of invisible crystal spheres set around each habitable system by a mysterious progenitor race that protect a civilization until it's ready to go out into interstellar space 
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Nov 29, 2018 20:22
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Lightning Knight posted:Be nice, Kerning. This thread is fun! Don’t ruin it for everyone else. Nothing about space is "fun": it is silent, it is dark, and it is completely hostile to anything we can identify as life. I'm sick of the romanticization of the fundamentally horrifying and humiliating situation we find ourselves in, and I'll fight it here as well. If that means I have to be the ice-cold water dumped on your rocket boners, so be it.
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Nov 29, 2018 20:25
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Kerning Chameleon posted:It was meant more in the "an adult addressing an adorably wrong child" sort of way, I apologise if any misogyny was inferred by my statements. This is... Not much better. My take on it, in general, is that once life is intelligent enough to make technological advances, it happens so fast on a cosmic scale that no one syncs up. If a technologically capable civilization started 40000 years ago, by the time we'd even be able to detect or interact, they have likely advanced far beyond anything we might be able to measure or interact with. That amount of time is massive in terms of our lives, but the tiniest blip in time in the universe. The "bigger fish" idea doesn't settle well in my mind because what resources could we have to offer that a space-faring race that they couldn't get more easily from a non-occupied planet/solar system? Any slavery options are absurd too because they incredibly likely have machines/techniques that can do all of that labor for them with far less trouble.
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Nov 29, 2018 20:27
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zoux posted:Check out the Revelation Space books. This is still kind of scary, in that we are effectively like an ant farm or gerbil and the relationship is still with another being on an incomprehensible scale. Obviously not as bad as getting factory farmed tho. Kerning Chameleon posted:Nothing about space is "fun": it is silent, it is dark, and it is completely hostile to anything we can identify as life. I'm sick of the romanticization of the fundamentally horrifying and humiliating situation we find ourselves in, and I'll fight it here as well. If that means I have to be the ice-cold water dumped on your rocket boners, so be it. I mean we aren’t gonna explore space, space is too big. But we can look at space and think about what could be in space. If you can’t at least try to be nice to other posters while being a wet blanket then shoo. Don’t be so condescending and rude.
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Nov 29, 2018 20:30
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Lightning Knight posted:This is still kind of scary, in that we are effectively like an ant farm or gerbil and the relationship is still with another being on an incomprehensible scale. It's from a Hugo winning short story by David Brin. All my Fermi Paradox knowledge comes from sci fi speculation (oh and so does every one else's  )
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Nov 29, 2018 20:31
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Maybe we're under some kind of galactic quarantine until we get to the point where we either pose enough of a threat for a direct intervention or we sort out ourselves at least enough to develop a reasonable society and FTL space travel, and then they make some direct contact. I have nothing concrete to base this on, but we do it on Earth with remote tribes (the missionary recently that got killed on that forbidden island for instance). I can reasonably see a far more advanced nearby civilization doing that with us. The nearest star is about 4 lightyears away and we don't have anything like the technology it would take to reach it in a reasoable frame of time, so we're effectively self-contained.
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Nov 29, 2018 20:36
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Adar posted:Here's a horror movie type take on it: It's from reddit but there's a great short story on this premise from a few years back. https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/2j3nxz/radio_silence/ quote:36,400,000. That is the expected number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy, according to Drake’s famous equation. For the last 78 years, we had been broadcasting everything about us – our radio, our television, our history, our greatest discoveries – to the rest of the galaxy. We had been shouting our existence at the top of our lungs to the rest of the universe, wondering if we were alone. 36 million civilizations, yet in almost a century of listening, we hadn’t heard a thing. We were alone. There being no signals from intelligent life because the Reapers from Mass Effect are real is a distinct and terrifying possibility.
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Nov 29, 2018 20:50
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Olpainless posted:I suspect the great filter is probably multicellular life, probably the mitochondria step. It's the only thing in the history of life in this world that took a LONG TIME to happen, as opposed to being basically taking over every niche as fast as possible. This is where I come down. Endosymbiosis is an *endlessly* fascinating idea, and speaks to the sheer unlikelihood of intelligent or complex life. In a game of nigh-endless dice rolls, endosymbiosis is hard mode. And near as we can tell, in the total history of life on earth, it’s happened exactly once.
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Nov 29, 2018 20:56
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axeil posted:
This was the plot from The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars. Noisy civilizations attract the Von Neumann probes and render their own extinction except for the Ships of the Law and those that are rescued by the Benefactors. An utterly terrifying thought.
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Nov 29, 2018 21:05
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thegalagakid posted:This was the plot from The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars. Noisy civilizations attract the Von Neumann probes and render their own extinction except for the Ships of the Law and those that are rescued by the Benefactors. An utterly terrifying thought. Fred Saberhagen would like to remind you not to forget ancient invincible planetoid-sized sentient doomsday weapons that turned on their masters and now rove the galaxy seeking and destroying all life
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Nov 29, 2018 21:22
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Why is the idea that killer alien probes being invisible is some common sense no duh thing but if joe the alien was in a probe we'd instantly see it no matter what by 2018 or it can't exist? Other than untreated depression why would reapers be able to be a thing we can't detect but just an alien hanging out making out with his space wife something that not detecting means must not exist?
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Nov 29, 2018 21:32
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zoux posted:Fred Saberhagen would like to remind you not to forget ancient invincible planetoid-sized sentient doomsday weapons that turned on their masters and now rove the galaxy seeking and destroying all life Berserker, I didn't know about this one. Thanks!
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Nov 29, 2018 21:38
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thegalagakid posted:Maybe we're under some kind of galactic quarantine until we get to the point where we either pose enough of a threat for a direct intervention or we sort out ourselves at least enough to develop a reasonable society and FTL space travel, and then they make some direct contact. I have nothing concrete to base this on, but we do it on Earth with remote tribes (the missionary recently that got killed on that forbidden island for instance). I can reasonably see a far more advanced nearby civilization doing that with us. The nearest star is about 4 lightyears away and we don't have anything like the technology it would take to reach it in a reasoable frame of time, so we're effectively self-contained. Actually using current technology humans can colonize the entire Milky Way galaxy in about a million years. This finding is what pushed many into the Great Filter camp.
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Nov 29, 2018 21:40
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qkkl posted:Actually using current technology humans can colonize the entire Milky Way galaxy in about a million years. This finding is what pushed many into the Great Filter camp. I always figured a "hive-mind" like species could conquer space. There would be no factions, no intra-conflict, no individuality or wants or need, and with that an effective use of resources to keep the home-planet sustainable (no civilization killing climate change). What I'm saying is, if there are interstellar civilizations out there, they are probably like the Arachnids from Starship Troopers or buggers from Enders Game. As for our species, I could see us colonize the inner solar system "The Expanse" style, but only if we figure our poo poo out regarding climate change on Earth.
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Nov 29, 2018 21:51
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thegalagakid posted:Berserker, I didn't know about this one. Thanks! The Berserker theory is an interesting one and sort of ties into the one example above. Any time a species gets relativistic flight, the Berserkers show up and destroy them because they possess the ultimate weapon: throwing a stone at a civilization at near the speed of light. Just the ability to do it means that whoever is first sets up Berserkers to defend themselves from some more violent upstart trying to conquer the galaxy. Or if the first are conquerors themselves, to ensure their supremacy. Solaris 2.0 posted:I always figured a "hive-mind" like species could conquer space. There would be no factions, no intra-conflict, no individuality or wants or need, and with that an effective use of resources to keep the home-planet sustainable (no civilization killing climate change). Not to get all Ray Kurzweil on everyone, but I could see humans developing a hive consciousness. We already are highly connected because of the internet and if you jammed everyone's phone into their brain and turned the technology up to 11, I could see some sort of collective consciousness establish itself. No individual would be able to perceive it, but everyone's actions could be subtlety coordinated. It'd be weird and alien but your hand/liver/etc doesn't realize it's part of your overall body and this collective consciousness would work similarly. axeil fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Nov 29, 2018 |
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Nov 29, 2018 21:56
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axeil posted:The Berserker theory is an interesting one and sort of ties into the one example above. Any time a species gets relativistic flight, the Berserkers show up and destroy them because they possess the ultimate weapon: throwing a stone at a civilization at near the speed of light. Again though, if berserkers are everywhere why doesn't the fermi paradox apply to "if berserkers are everywhere, why don't we see them"? if not seeing things is possible than we solved the fermi paradox without berserkers.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:07
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A Wheezy Steampunk posted:Found it after more searching! Here's the summary: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/513781/moores-law-and-the-origin-of-life/ and the original: https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3381. I did have some of the details wrong, it wasn't before the universe formed, it was before the Earth formed: This is interesting but my main objection is how do they know the data actually fits a linear regression? What if it's some sort of weird exponential thing that doesn't model easily? And what if each step has varying levels of difficulty in "doubling"? That they got a result that seems implausible (life should have sprung into existence before the earth's existence) makes me question their methods. Owlofcreamcheese posted:Again though, if berserkers are everywhere why doesn't the fermi paradox apply to "if berserkers are everywhere, why don't we see them"? if not seeing things is possible than we solved the fermi paradox without berserkers. We aren't looking correctly perhaps? Berserkers solve the issue around "if there are millions of civilizations why did none of them try to colonize space?" If you admit that there are likely lots of civilizations out there, the chance that none of them tried to make probes or other things we would see evidence of is very small. But if Berserkers exist then they kill off every civilization that tries to explore or communicate.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:10
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Solaris 2.0 posted:I always figured a "hive-mind" like species could conquer space. There would be no factions, no intra-conflict, no individuality or wants or need, and with that an effective use of resources to keep the home-planet sustainable (no civilization killing climate change). I have some bad news about intra-hive conflicts between hive-mind Earth-based species.
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Nov 29, 2018 22:10
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Again though, if berserkers are everywhere why doesn't the fermi paradox apply to "if berserkers are everywhere, why don't we see them"? if not seeing things is possible than we solved the fermi paradox without berserkers. It's not a serious theory. ....I hope....
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Nov 29, 2018 22:14
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