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Here's a horror movie type take on it: -Let's assume that life is extremely common and intelligent life is only slightly less common. -Let's further assume that the technological curve of any given civilization is similar to our own, i.e. an Industrial Revolution type event can make a military from the year 2000 completely obliterate every military combined on an 1800-era planet. -Let's also assume technology doesn't ever entirely stall out / there will always be some advancements to be made. -This means no two civilizations will ever be at the same stage of development and the more advanced civilization is extremely likely to technologically and militarily dominate the weaker one. Insert colonialism comparison here. -This also means the weaker civilization can never catch up without immense effort. -Based on the law of large numbers, any given civilization is vanishingly unlikely to be the most senior. Unless you're leading the Galactic Council and have personally checked, you can never be sure. -It is also vanishingly unlikely that all civilizations have the same benevolent mindset. Wholly benevolent civilizations could happen, but they themselves would never be sure there isn't a Big Bad out there. A Big Bad would also never know whether it was the biggest. Game theory suggests a preemptive arms race of some type is a certainty by at least some civilizations; even if they don't run into the Biggest Bad they could always come across an only slightly inferior and hyper militarized force. -If you don't have galactic FTL scanners and cannot check everything, how do you deal with this? What happens when you can build Dyson sphere type monuments but they're a galactic broadcast to anyone who uses the visual spectrum? Aren't you eventually marking yourself for death? 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.
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Nov 29, 2018 18:30
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zoux posted:Isn't this similar to the Three Body Problem take? I've only read a summary. There's a lot of sci fi that uses malicious conquering races or all devouring Von Neumann machines as the solution for the Fermi paradox. A little but not quite. Sci fi tends to focus on one race being conquered by another or an automated threat like von Neumanns. But even in those cases the conquerer or probe is not going to be the Biggest Bad, because across the entire universe the probability of that is effectively 0. In fact no sane race would ever deploy a von Neumann voluntarily because a Bigger Bad, which the probes will eventually always encounter, will trace them back to their source. The law of large numbers is a real bitch when you think in those terms. 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.
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Nov 29, 2018 18:49
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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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Verviticus posted:if the only logical conclusion is that there must always be a bigger bad out there, wouldn't this also stop the biggest bad from operating? and then the first/biggest bad to get over their fear would quickly outpace the ones that are afraid of the theoretical biggest bad unfortunately that only works if everyone is rational and/or sensor technology doesn't outpace other stuff. if a spacefaring race is rational, aware of this paradox and wants to avoid it they would naturally throw themselves into sensor research and shielding communications, which leads us back here. the implications of the universe containing a very close to infinite number of planets and thus a near infinite number of eldritch horrors threatening each of them are pretty grim.
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Nov 30, 2018 01:05
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Haystack posted:Aliens don't have interstellar civilizations for exactly the same reason humans never will: it costs way, way, waaaay too much energy, and is way too slow. A physicist on another forum I frequent broke it down like this: Graphs like that don't impress me because they don't think long term enough. Let's take 0.5c and quadruple the cost: a 30 year trip with the ISS, 26 in subjective time, takes 56 "globes" in 2018 terms. Here's the graph of energy consumption since 1800:  Like everything else it's an exponential curve. 56 globes is unimaginable today but a hundred years ago it would've been 560 globes and there's no real physical reason that it can't be .056 globes in 300 more years. It doesn't even have to be on Earth itself. A few centuries from now a space elevator and outsourcing the energy costs to the massive solar farms a few million kilometers out that power the laser that shoots into the lightsail probably won't look that bad. Adar fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Nov 30, 2018 |
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Nov 30, 2018 03:46
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Harik posted:What's the name of the theory that life exists right now, but we won't see evidence of it for billions of years? That conditions aren't unique to earth, but that the 3rd generation star is a hard requirement so there aren't all that many with a 4-billion year head start on us that are less than 4bn LY away. Due to the Sun's expansion, somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion years from now the Earth's oceans will boil away. The Goldilocks zone isn't a constant for a given solar system and moves outwards over time as the sun gets bigger. Even multicellular life is at least 600 million years old or so, so you can make a credible claim that if multicellular life is the Filter, humans arrived roughly at the midpoint of viability. Of course, that assumes water/carbon is necessary for life which isn't a safe assumption at all. We could easily discover a silicon based organism that doesn't use DNA in some deep rocks tomorrow and it wouldn't even be a total surprise.
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Nov 30, 2018 20:45
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Kerning Chameleon posted:Here's an idea: how about we don't further infect the galaxy with our brand of disgusting bio spooge. Maybe Earth-originated life isn't a very good thing in the cosmic view of things, and we should endeavor to contain it instead of spewing it everywhere out of some bullshit lizard-brain directive to "GROW, EXPAND, EXPLODE". I hate to bring up the law of large numbers again but if we assume a trillion trillion planets, I promise you Earth spooge is a distant 10^10^10th worst at best and will not hold a candle to the Andromeda shoggoth
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Nov 30, 2018 23:27
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Other than some weirdos like squid and crows that are doing their own thing most of the really smart animals are mammals and generally are modern versions that evolved pretty recently. Like bottlenose dolphins are ~5 million years old. We crossed the magic line where being a tiny bit smarter hits the singularity and we invent complex language and explode into being able to make cellphones like 100 generations later but that isn't really that far ahead in the grand scheme of things. It's not like everyone else has been failing and failing for ages. The other smart animals are only a little older (or younger!) than we are. We won the race, but just barely, lots and lots of mammals have been rapidly developing more neural complexity. We have only been around a short amount of time, with tons and tons of animals only slightly behind us. we are loving up elephants so there isn't going to be much elephant future left, but if they had another few million years, they probably aren't much dumber than we were a few million years ago. Owlofcreamcheese posted:There isn't really semi-intelligent animals that have been on earth significantly longer than people have been. dolphins and elephants are younger species than humans, dogs and pigs are younger than agriculture, and aren't from animals that have been around any longer than people. octopus and crows are amazing and some of the coolest and most clever things that exist, but die young and aren't really as smart as a dolphin or chimp, just alien and cool about how clever they are. Sample size problem: you're looking at the animals that are around today and going "yep, these are all as smart as anything has ever been, intelligence is a race to the top, pack it in boys". There could easily have been smart, even basic tool using dinosaurs around for tens of millions of years. Why does Archaeopteryx have to be dumber than a crow, or a velociraptor dumber than a wolf? Octopi have been around since at least the Jurassic, and there's no real reason the early ones would have been less intelligent. The filter isn't intelligence, it's opposable thumbs that allows us to make things that could potentially wind up in the fossil record; raptors could have all averaged a 200 IQ for all we'll ever know.
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Dec 2, 2018 00:46
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DrSunshine posted:Even so, with the laws of probability and just given the sheer numbers involved here -- 250 +/- 150 billion stars -- it somewhat strains belief that out of all the low-gravity earths that exist, only one of them (us) in the past 5 billion years would have been given birth to a spacefaring (or nearly) spacefaring civilization. It would only take one, after all. It may very well be that there are lots of intelligent civilizations that can't escape from their super earth worlds, but even if only a tiny tiny fraction of them were capable of it, you'd think that they would be the ones out there expanding across the galaxy. Some more numbers that might help: -with 250B stars the galaxy's likely to have > a trillion planets -the Goldilocks zone doesn't necessarily matter, since life doesn't need to be water based (and if it's silicon or some other weirder thing it should be able to build space stuff orders of magnitude easier and faster) -life seems to have spent a billion years or more in the single cell stage, another few hundred million in the oceans, another few hundred million loving around with reptiles/amphibians (which could have been smart, we don't know)...but after the asteroid, a spacefaring civilization evolved in a relative eyeblink. basically, even with our sample size of one, we know that the jump from a mass extinction (which we've had 5 of) to space can take as little as 65 million years. the total carbon based habitable lifespan of the Earth is about 2-3 billion years. that's 3% at worst. -even on Earth itself, there was no real reason the planet had to spend the Triassic-Cretaceous eras with some version of a dinosaur as a dominant species. if the Permian extinction had gone a little differently and their warm blooded shrew equivalent happened to come out on top that time instead of the other time, mammals could theoretically have been in space 200 million years ago. this ignores all the other mass extinction setbacks as well as the couple of times that nearly everything on the planet froze to death but we happen not to have good fossil records of. -we aren't the first, that's nuts. Space predator/prey interaction sounds crazy, but Earth is so thoroughly dominated by predator/prey interaction that we don't really have a single complex animal that doesn't predate in some way! If it hasn't evolved chlorophyll or an equivalent, it lives off some other living organism. This is a Problem when thinking about benevolent alien overlords.
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Dec 7, 2018 19:57
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I don't think anyone's seriously suggesting space wolves or "real" space predators that go into gravity wells to eat prey because space reasons. What I wanted to point out is that if basic biology across the galaxy is anything like ours, virtually all interaction *between* complex species is in a predator/prey or parasitic context, relatively little is genuinely symbiotic (although there's naturally a truckload of second and third level interactions where plants attract aphid predators to eat the aphids and so forth) and most of that has been true for upwards of a billion years. Humans have overcome a bunch of that but not enough to instinctively flinch when we see a snake, feel bad about eating 95% of the stuff we eat, or stop making movies about space predators that go into gravity wells to hunt for sport. I don't really see a reason why a space overlord would handle that better than we do. Silicon based life and other kinds of life that are not remotely interested in competing for the same resources as us are possibly our best bet to overcome that evolutionary problem on both sides.
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Dec 10, 2018 19:02
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The good news is space rock launches from Over There don't really work as a weapon because the target can see them coming too far away and if they have a similar tech curve to us and are smart enough they'll destroy the rocks, go dark and then quietly go after the source for the next ten thousand years. The bad news is space rock launches from Over Here in the Oort Cloud or other-solar equivalent do work much faster and spotting a miniature robot probe of the minimum size required to nudge an asteroid is a lot harder than spotting the asteroid.
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Dec 10, 2018 22:15
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Kerning Chameleon posted:The analogy is that the absurd scenario I posited still has a much better chance of success than of us If there are aliens in range to get our broadcasts and reply within our lifetimes, the two prerequisites of FTL and lots of practice doing this before are very close to 100% certain.
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Jan 10, 2019 20:25
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MixMastaTJ posted:
Small tribes of humans put flags on everything and wiped out other small tribes of humans so long ago that we have uncovered 100,000 year old fossilized massacres. Even gorillas fight wars. Which brings me back to the point that nearly all life on Earth is a prey or a predator species, and if there's a universal theme for intelligent life out there it may well be that prey/predator interactions are required for quick evolution and sapience aka RIP us.
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Jan 11, 2019 20:36
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khwarezm posted:Predation is like the easiest thing in the world to evolve, you don't even need a nervous system to do it, and it tends not to lead to human level intelligence. That's the point - on Earth, it's so easy to evolve that it's the dominant strategy, which has meant that basically everything from plants onwards only exists in the context of a predator/prey dynamic. That might turn out to be wrong if all the biological dark matter is from random deep organisms that reproduce once a millennium, but that stuff doesn't really even interact with surface life. If being a part of a food chain is required for intelligence it likely means every intelligent species has at least some instinctual behavior humans would find familiar, like "things that don't look like you might be threats". This is not a comforting thought.
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Jan 15, 2019 02:52
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Bug Squash posted:I think the predator/prey stuff isn't going to be relevant to anyone capable of enough abstract thought to reach another solar system. Even some kind of implausible sentient rock is going to be capable of reasoning if something is an existential threat even if it had no evolutionary history of that. Predator/prey is why we, the humans who will likely be capable of visiting other planets (with one way lightsail robots) this century, are a walking bag of neuroses and insider/outsider conflicts.
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Jan 15, 2019 15:11
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 07:04 |
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Bug Squash posted:You were talking about the psychology of other intelligent species in the previous post, don't be doing the old switcheroo. With our current sample size of one, it's very clearly relevant. When we meet another species, if it also has predator/prey baggage, that would potentially seem to be a big deal.
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Jan 15, 2019 22:27
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