[HN Gopher] Beyond "Fermi's Paradox" XVI: What Is the "Dark Fore...
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Beyond "Fermi's Paradox" XVI: What Is the "Dark Forest" Hypothesis?
Author : Hooke
Score : 154 points
Date : 2021-07-15 04:31 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.universetoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.universetoday.com)
| InsomniacL wrote:
| I have a theory that intelligence isn't particularly rare however
| the rate of development may be. It has long been alluded to in
| Sci-Fi that humanity's rate of development is fast (Humans vs
| Vulcans, Halo universe, etc). I imagine that one of the great
| barriers is that a civilisation with a lower rate of development
| may stuck in an industrial type era unable to progress before
| doing irreparable damage to their environment/eco-structure. Does
| anyone know if this theory has a name?
| yarg wrote:
| I think that the biggest issue's gonna be a time gap.
|
| Life shows up and spends a long time doing not much, then
| exponential growth kicks in, life gets smart and suicides out
| in 100000 years or so.
|
| The rate of intelligent and communicating planets is going to
| be low enough; the chance of two such planets within a distance
| that allowed for bidirectional communication existing
| simultaneously is dwindling - and even then they'll be at
| different points in their growth curves.
|
| If ever we meet aliens they'll be cavemen or gods.
| chadwittman wrote:
| Love that quote: "If ever we meet aliens they'll be cavemen
| or gods."
| rybosworld wrote:
| That seems like an idealization of humanity imo, and is common
| in sci-fi. The most likely scenario is that we are average in
| every way.
| handrous wrote:
| > It has long been alluded to in Sci-Fi that humanity's rate of
| development is fast (Humans vs Vulcans, Halo universe, etc).
|
| I think that's just borrowed from modern fantasy tropes. How
| can humans co-exist on anything even kinda like equal footing
| with centuries-old magical elves, ancient dwarves who know the
| secrets of the deep, bloodthirsty and strong orcs and goblins,
| et c? Oh, humans are more flexible (culturally more diverse;
| more varied from person to person; develop & experiment faster;
| are more curious; freer from genetic determinism in their
| choices and behavior), breed faster, or cooperate better.
|
| Usually one or more of those is the answer given, with the
| specific question being "how can we have interesting and
| powerful fantasy species/races and still have humans matter in
| our stories, without every story just being an
| upstairs/downstairs thing or otherwise having the humans in
| some plainly-inferior position?" There are other ways around
| the problem, but that's the easy way out.
| qayxc wrote:
| It's one of the Great Filters [0] - I don't know if it has a
| catchy name.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
| yreg wrote:
| To be fair, even with our (fast paced?) rate of development we
| have a hard time to tech fast enough to outrun the industrial
| damage.
|
| On the other hand, only total extinction might be truly
| "irreparable".
| hnbad wrote:
| It's also not correct to claim we are no longer "stuck in an
| industrial type era" just because most of the Western world
| is post-industrial. We largely offloaded the industrial era
| into the third world.
|
| You don't see kids in coal mines in England but you do see
| people dipping circuit boards in vats of acid without
| protective equipment in India. We may be investing in
| renewables in the US and Europe but we still flood parts of
| Africa and the Sea with crude oil and all that lithium
| doesn't mine itself.
|
| The "Industrial Age" may be over but the damage is still
| being done and all the shiny new tech is largely window
| dressing. It's also not yet clear that the shiny post-
| Industrialism can easily exist without the rest of the world
| perpetually playing "catch-up" (i.e. whether it really is
| catching up) as our quality of living heavily hinges on
| underpaying other countries for resources and labor.
| [deleted]
| zabzonk wrote:
| Note that this is just one in a series of articles - check out
| the links at the end.
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| My theory, and I don't know why this is never mentioned: all
| societies eventually retreat into inhabiting a purely simulated
| universe (Matrix/Holodeck), where EM emissions and space
| exploration become a thing of the past, and the society just
| "goes dark".
|
| The dynamic that guarantees it is that great stuff is almost
| always cheaper/easier to experience via simulation than in
| reality. We already know that TV plots and video game situations
| are endlessly more entertaining than our real-world lives.
| Arranging computing power that can fool our eyes and ears is way
| easier than mustering the materials to get ourselves into space.
| yoz-y wrote:
| Isaac Arthur mentions this several times. But the counter
| argument is that with advanced civilisations having gigantic
| populations, it is hard to imagine that a "small" group
| counting in quadrillions wouldn't prefer to live in the real
| world.
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| Given that most complex life is probably carbon based, and given
| the one planet with complex life we can observe, my guess is that
| most complex life runs into one of two paths:
|
| 1. You don't have enough easily accessible hydrocarbons in ground
| to build a civilization advanced enough to even get you into
| space.
|
| 2. You do have enough hydrocarbons which leads to inevitable
| overshoot, and accompanying collapse before you ever get close to
| figuring out interstellar travel. Exponential growth patterns
| lead you to either exhaust the carrying capacity of your planet,
| or you end up warming your planet too much and die off (or a
| little bit of both).
|
| We're a pretty good case study between 1 and 2. Right now we're
| in a race to see if we can exhaust our hydrocarbons or overheat
| our planet first, there seems to be no realistic alternative
| (plenty of nice fantasy ones though).
|
| If we had reached peak oil in the early 80s (or sooner) we would
| have likely avoided catastrophic climate change, but would have
| started a major population shift downwards towards 1 billion,
| where we would have likely stabilized but with no major technical
| progress (technological progress is largely a function of
| energy).
|
| We didn't though, so now it seems like we are going to continue
| to increase the rate we combust hydrocarbons until we create an
| unlivable planet (at least for us). A few billionaires are making
| some cool toys, but we don't seem to be able to survive until
| we're anywhere near interstellar travel.
| overgard wrote:
| I'm not an expert by any means, but I guess I've always felt
| skeptical that if alien civilizations existed we would have the
| means to detect them. I mean, we can _barely_ detect planets, if
| we look carefully. Unless one of these civilizations really
| wanted to make itself seen by desperately spending a ton of
| energy, it seems like they would mostly be invisible just because
| we don 't have sensitive enough means to detect them.
|
| I personally find it impossibly unlikely that we are the only
| intelligent life. It's just, there's nothing in the universe that
| doesn't repeat. And there is a lot of space for us to repeat. Our
| solar system likely isn't all that special, so I just don't get
| that we could be the only thing that appeared in all the
| conceivable universe.
|
| It also might be the case that we're not alone, but that life is
| just so hard to get going that maybe the nearest civilization is
| galaxies apart from us. In that sense I suppose we really are
| "alone" for any practical purpose.
| Symmetry wrote:
| One paper on the Fermi Paradox I want to plug is this one by
| Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
|
| Most people when doing the Fermi estimate for the number of
| civilizations in the Galaxy use numbers that tend to result in a
| lot of them. But different people use very different numbers in
| different steps. If you look at the ranges of values that
| different people assign to the different terms then suddenly it
| doesn't seem very unlikely that intelligent civilizations could
| be rare.
| detritus wrote:
| Huh. I could've sworn the name and concept of the Dark Forest
| hypothesis predated Liu Cixin's book. Obviously I have it
| completely arse-about-face - I thought he developed the series
| based upon the concept, not the other way around.
| burntsushi wrote:
| This blurb has some citation links that suggest it predated Liu
| Cixin's book:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Communication_is...
|
| My understanding was that Cixin's book gave it the name "Dark
| Forest," along with the eerie analogy.
| detritus wrote:
| Aye, the basic concept was covered in this a couple of
| decades ago - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Star
| (which has just about as dark a conclusion as Cixin's trilogy
| does), but it was the actual Dark Forest name specifcially I
| thought existed prior.
|
| Clearly I'd been unwittingly absorbing output from people
| who'd already read his books ahead of me!
|
| - ed oh! I see The Killing Star's mentioned in the original
| linked article. It's worth a read, if you haven't already.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Greg Bear's novels _Forge of God_ (1987) and _Anvil of Stars_
| (1993) explore the same idea. They feel a little dated now
| but the first one in particular is still well worth a read
| imo.
| detritus wrote:
| Huh, I can't remember that [apparently fundamental] aspect
| of those two books. I'm going to see if I still have a copy
| of Forge of God on the bookshelf when I get home later,
| thanks.
|
| Last time I re-read one of his books (Eon, probably), I was
| quite bemused by the comically-simplistic 80s-esque Cold
| War perspective though!
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| [spoilers]
|
| In the first book the earth is attacked by Von Neumann
| probes launched preemptively by a civilization that wants
| to destroy potential agressors before they develop the
| technology to become a risk. The "benefactor"
| civilization group organises rescue and counter-assaults
| as a means of pan-civilisation trust building. The second
| book looks at the ethics of destroying a civ based on
| decisions it may have taken in its distant past.
|
| _Anvil_ has something of a young adult style, but the
| game theory and strategy elements are quite satisfying I
| think.
| zhynn wrote:
| A group collaborating will have better chance of survival than an
| individual. The upside of working with your neighbors outweighs
| the benefit of destroying them.
| chadwittman wrote:
| Tell that to the species we've eradicated while pursuing our
| goals.
| qayxc wrote:
| That might be true for individuals of the same (social)
| species, but I don't think that's a given in the context of
| technological civilisations competing for resources.
| dfilppi wrote:
| Perhaps. But we're not talking about individuals.
| taneq wrote:
| Just started book 3, I'm clearly being Baader-Meinhoff'd. I think
| the basic logic of preemptive first strikes being the universally
| safest response is sound, assuming the current trend continues
| that a species' offensive capabilities will grow faster than its
| defensive capabilities as it improves its mastery of physics.
| Even if in the short term, some civilizations are inherently
| friendly and some are inherently hostile, in the long term the
| chances of any randomly selected civilization being hostile
| approaches unity due to survivor bias.
|
| It's pretty similar to one of my favourite quotes, from Peter
| Watts:
|
| > Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They
| didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of
| intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials-- but if there are
| any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going
| to be _mean._
|
| (I'm admittedly finding a lot of the other plot points of the
| series, especially around how people respond to adversity, less
| convincing though.)
| raldi wrote:
| Note that the Arecibo message diagram in this article is wrong;
| the image is flipped left-right from how it's typically
| displayed, so when the opening is described as "the numbers 1-10
| from left to right", it's actually from right to left.
| rnhmjoj wrote:
| > In other words, the finite nature of resources will ultimately
| pit one civilization against another as they all struggle to
| sustain their growth.
|
| I'm not sure this constraint is so strict to force a strong
| competition for survival, given how vast the universe is. It
| seems to me this projecting our earth-bound mentality of limited
| resources to a whole different scale, where it may not really
| apply.
| dragonelite wrote:
| Once we are earth loose we will be solar bound and human
| factions will fight for solar resources/domination.
| pharke wrote:
| During star formation up to half of the matter can be
| rejected. During planetary formation a lot of fairly large
| bodies will be ejected, think moon size, along with a lot of
| smaller stuff too. Interstellar space probably has a lot more
| to offer than we generally think.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| According to this theory, the resource consumers in the
| universe are just as vast as the universe itself. At the end of
| the series the final resource constraint they deal with is
| running out of physical matter in the universe. Once the
| civilizations depicted in the book are done mastering survival
| in this universe, they all turn their attention to surviving
| the death of the universe. Stability simply moves the survival
| goalposts, and "we could probably last a few billion years" (or
| rephrased, "we will probably perish in a few billion years")
| becomes the new existential crisis to solve.
| [deleted]
| mikro2nd wrote:
| Precisely. IMHO any civilisation capable of interstellar travel
| (at any speed) has solved all necessary questions/problems of
| resource/energy acquisition and control and has no need to
| plunder the resources of others.
| riffraff wrote:
| that is what I thought when I read the three-body problem.
|
| If you can manipulate space-time at the levels exposed in the
| book you can trivially build orbitals that will host trillions
| of beings and live in a post-scarcity society for millennia,
| after which your society is likely to disappear waaay before
| you run out of space and resources.
| yoz-y wrote:
| Why or how would a post scarcity multi planetary or even
| multi stellar civilisation disappear? I agree that there is
| no need for plunder, but I don't think highly advanced
| civilisations are in risk of extinction.
| riffraff wrote:
| Well, I don't know.
|
| It is just a common topic in fiction that great
| civilizations just fade out, and it seems reasonable to me.
| I do not believe the average individual would want to live
| forever, and at some point I feel the same would apply to
| civilizations. But for the sake of fun, I can recall some
| ideas from literature :)
|
| Maybe they evolve into higher states of being and leave our
| plane of existence.
|
| Maybe they stop reproducing and slowly die out.
|
| Maybe they reach a level of self-introspection where they
| believe continuing existing is pointless.
|
| Maybe they migrate to a more reliable virtual world in a
| sub-space computer.
|
| Maybe each individual gets its own universe.
|
| Maybe the society splinters over some trivial concepts and
| the old knowledge is lost when the machines start to fail.
|
| There's a lot of interesting things that can happen, let's
| hope we'll find out late enough :)
| pdimitar wrote:
| > _In other words, the finite nature of resources will ultimately
| pit one civilization against another as they all struggle to
| sustain their growth._
|
| I absolutely can't see how that follows exactly. The Universe,
| hell, just our own galaxy, is pretty damn _big_. The time and
| fuel it could cost you to get to the adjacent civilization and
| steal its resources might be way too much compared to, you know,
| invest in some cosmic mining operations where you can get a
| Bonanza of resources just by poking into your local asteroid
| cluster.
|
| To address the rest of this argument, a civilization might be as
| malicious as they come and they could still be very powerless and
| can't just go terrorize somebody.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| This paper discusses the "dark forest" idea and concludes that it
| is very unlikely to be true: https://arxiv.org/abs/1302.0606 MAD
| with Aliens? Interstellar deterrence and its implications
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| The "MAD with Aliens" portion of the book isn't particularly
| relevant to the dark forest theory it postulates. The MAD in
| the book only applies to a conflict between earth and another
| nearby non-technologically-sophisticated alien spices, who are
| competing for earths resources in order to survive. The
| conflict is resolved by both us and them advancing beyond the
| need for earth, and becoming full dark forest participants.
| rvba wrote:
| I dont understand why politicians allow those active messages
| sent - most people probably dont want them.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Am I missing something, or is this article very narrowly missing
| the most damning criticism of the Dark Forest hypothesis
| according to the article's own logic? The first paragraph of the
| " _Criticism_ " section says:
|
| > _Overall, the Dark Forest Hypothesis has an internal logic and
| consistency that makes it an appealing (if somewhat somber)
| potential resolution to Fermi's age-old question. Unfortunately,
| it also suffers from an inherent flaw that is capable of
| unraveling the whole thing. Like many other Fermi-related
| hypotheses, it only takes one exception to this rule to prove it
| wrong._
|
| Given this, I thought it was going to follow on to point out that
| _we_ are the exception to the rule, but instead it goes on to
| talk about malevolent exceptions. But, as the article mentioned
| earlier, we have made many active attempts to communicate our
| existence to other hypothetical civilisations, and we make no
| effort in obscuring our radio signals.
|
| Is it possible that other civilisations follow the "Dark Forest"
| principle? Of course it is! But why would we happen to be the
| only civilisation that doesn't really worry about getting seen?
| The possibility that we are not alone _and_ we are the only ones
| trying to communicate sounds even more fanciful and
| anthropocentric than any of the alternatives.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| 1 exception doesn't disprove this rule. There could be any
| number of reasons for one or some civilisations to broadcast
| but not be destroyed:
|
| * it takes time, we've only been broadcasting for 70 years or
| so. 70 light years isn't that far.
|
| * we are far from dangerous listeners (we are right out on an
| arm in the milky way galaxy)
|
| * all planets broadcast for a while at least (we did so without
| any serious consideration) and not all broadcasts end in
| annihilation. Up until just 40 years ago we seemed pretty
| likely to wipe ourselves out with war, even if an alien were
| planning our destruction, why not wait and see if we did it
| ourselves?
|
| * Popular methods of destruction might not apply to our solar
| systems. If you rely on near by asteroids or free-floating
| planets to destroy civilisations and there happen to be none
| near sol, then we are safe to broadcast even if no one is safe
| to reply.
|
| * if more than 1 alien actively destroys planets we might be
| lucky and have the aliens who detected us assume other aliens
| will destroy us. As long as they are happy to wait, we can
| broadcast in blissful ignorance believing we disproved the dark
| forest when we're actually just in the middle of a Mexican
| standoff...
|
| * If a civilisation destroys other civilisations as soon as it
| detects them, you can use the abrupt destruction of
| civilisations to triangulate that civilisation. And destroy it.
| And that's a high priority since that way you find hidden civs
| AND ones which pose an immediate and serious threat to you. The
| best defence against this is to allow plenty of time between
| detecting and destroying a civilisation, especially a harmless
| unarmed (in the cosmic scale) one like ours. The lack of many
| close neighbours to us means a would be destroyer needs to wait
| even longer before striking us to maintain their annonimity.
|
| Ironically this last point is the best argument against the
| dark forest: why destroy soft targets like earth when doing so
| reveals your existence? Why not wait, let someone else hit us
| and then hit them since they were a much bigger threat. So
| you'd expect a certain amount of noisy "prey" to be left as
| bait by one predator for another...
|
| Also, I don't think we are broadcasting very much anymore. The
| move to digital broadcasts (lower power) and to Internet based
| comms/media (99% undetectable even from orbit) mean we're a lot
| less visible than we were previously.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| The book responds to most of the "not there yet" concerns.
| The idea is that if there are 1,000 species aware of even
| primitive life on a particular planet, chances are at least
| one of them will be close enough for it to be worth the
| effort to destroy it. This is because technological
| development is exponential and you can't predict if/when a
| planet will produce dangerous technology equal or greater
| than your own. If you wait, you only increase the risk of
| being destroyed.
| nirui wrote:
| Ah... the "Dark Forest Theory". People really put way too much
| unnecessary time on it.
|
| If the theory was true, then the first thing those "tree-body
| man" would reasonably do is to just destroy the solar system
| straight away with that super illegal (to the law of physics)
| raindrop probe. A civilization with the intention of discover
| and kill will definitely make their probes efficient kill
| devices, right? Why pay the expense of identify and kill the
| "Key actors" one by one when you can delete a entire system for
| cheap? Just turn the probe into a blackhole to kill the sun, it
| should be easy if the probe was really that dense.
|
| A more direct attack is rooted in the theory itself: for the
| theory to be true, a state/condition called Cai Yi Lian (Chain
| Of Suspicion) must be created. The content of Chain Of
| Suspicion is simple: - A civilization cannot
| determine if another civilization is evil - A
| civilization cannot determine if other civilizations will view
| itself as evil - A civilization cannot determine if
| another civilization will launch an attack against it -
| A civilization cannot determine if itself is evil - A
| civilization cannot determine if another civilization view
| themself as evil - A civilization cannot determine if
| another civilization will treat itself in such way that been
| determined unevil - ... ... (The article that I quoted
| from has this at the last line: https://wiki.mbalib.com/wiki/%E
| 9%BB%91%E6%9A%97%E6%A3%AE%E6%9E%97%E6%B3%95%E5%88%99#.E5.8F.B6.
| E6.96.87.E6.B4.81.E6.8F.90.E5.87.BA.E7.9A.84.E2.80.9C.E5.9F.BA.
| E6.9C.AC.E5.85.AC.E7.90.86.E2.80.9D.E5.92.8C.E4.B8.A4.E5.A4.A7.
| E9.87.8D.E8.A6.81.E6.A6.82.E5.BF.B5)
|
| Have you see the hole here? For a civilization that advanced,
| what are the chances that they're not equipped with also
| advanced social and science knowledge and skills? Heck, their
| advanced probe could probably even do all the observation and
| tests fully automatically and report the result back. The Chain
| Of Suspicion will never form to begin with because they CAN
| determine the facts if they really wants to. And then so the
| Dark Forest will never form too (at least not for the advanced
| side).
|
| Now, let's talk about some serious thing. Because I've noticed
| some people uses the Dark Forest Theory to explain the relation
| between nations (yes, Earth nations). So it is really important
| to realize that the entire theory is nothing more than a plot
| device that Liu Cixin employed for his novel, among many other
| plots. Most of them are there to make the story more
| convenient, instead of more logical (as I have said, based on
| the theory, the logical thing to do is to wipe everything out
| at contact, how convenient that the probe "JuST cAnT" huh?).
|
| So, if the theory inspired you do to something good, then nice,
| go ahead, have a good life, help people, communticate with
| others, try to understand others, have fun. However, if you
| believe the "Dark Forest Theory" is THE true governing rule of
| the universe, then you probably overthink it too much, stop it,
| it's not healthy. And guess what, the planet we're living on
| hosts multiple civilizations, you stick with us now no matter
| what.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > The possibility that we are not alone and we are the only
| ones trying to communicate sounds even more fanciful and
| anthropocentric than any of the alternatives.
|
| Well, yes. But it could also make the (possibly) few blithe
| spirits who do want communicate be in general much further
| away, and thus much harder to communicate with.
| HotHotLava wrote:
| Wouldn't the counterpoint be that those civilizations like us
| that do not obscure their location are quickly eradicated by
| others in the forest? So the forest also acts like a filter for
| those that are not careful enough.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| I don't see that as a counterpoint, but more of a _post hoc_
| theory. How could the eradicators detect and destroy their
| victims before we detected any signal at all from the
| victims? And why haven 't the eradicators come for us yet?
|
| Of course, this could always be explained by the distances
| involved and the limitations of light speed, but that would
| make the Dark Forest hypothesis redundant as an explanation
| as to why we haven't yet detected any alien civilisation(s).
| yreg wrote:
| >How could the eradicators detect and destroy their victims
| before we detected any signal at all from the victims?
|
| Even if they destroy them within say a thousand years, then
| at any given time there would be only few civilizations at
| the right age to be broadcasting. And not very loud at
| that.
|
| We listen only to a miniscule portion of the Galaxy. IMO,
| Fermi's question shouldn't be "Why can't we hear the few
| civs that are close to our level".
|
| It should be "How come we don't detect Kardashev >2 civs
| collonizing most of the galaxy?" Why can't we detect a
| single Dyson Sphere?
|
| (I don't consider dark forest explanation to be probable
| though.)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The Fermi question is a lot closer to "how come Earth
| wasn't colonized before we even appear?" than "how come
| we can't see anybody?".
| yreg wrote:
| Yes, that's a cleaner way to put it.
| mokus wrote:
| How do we know we aren't the colonists?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| You mean how we know the Earth wasn't seeded with
| something similar to archeo-bacteria on purpose? We don't
| but that doesn't solve the problem.
|
| Or how do we know that we, humans, aren't the colonists?
| Well, all the life we know comes from the same ancestry,
| including us.
| yreg wrote:
| That doesn't solve the paradox though, unless we are
| quaranteened in a Zoo.
| tjalfi wrote:
| There have been a couple science fiction novels with this
| premise:
|
| Protector[0] by Larry Niven
|
| David Weber's Dahak trilogy, available as the Empire from
| the Ashes[1] omnibus
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protector_(novel)
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_from_the_Ashes
| saiya-jin wrote:
| I think what would explain this is our very limited
| timespan when we started listening to universe. There might
| have been 10 strong signals in last 2000 years, but last
| one could have happened around the time US declared
| independence.
|
| And 2000 years is nothing timewise on scale of universe.
| Plus we talk about signal that can maybe travel few hundred
| / a thousand light years before they blend into galactic
| and intergalactic noise.
| taneq wrote:
| > How could the eradicators detect and destroy their
| victims before we detected any signal at all from the
| victims? And why haven't the eradicators come for us yet?
|
| Because most civilizations are probably still a 100+ light
| years apart and we just haven't been around and listening
| for that long? Even if we've theoretically had the chance
| to detect another early civilization the other listeners
| have been listening for aeons longer than us and are much
| better at it.
| Causality1 wrote:
| I don't see there being that big a technological leap between
| annihilating another civilization and starting a colony in
| another star system. If you're the type of civilization that
| would be interested in killing a competitor off you're
| probably the type that's going to colonize and fill the
| entire galaxy in a few million years. We evolved, so that
| hasn't happened, in a galaxy thirteen billion years old. I
| suspect we're alone.
| syops wrote:
| The energy requirement to send a life destroying device to
| a far away planet might be much less than the energy
| requirement to send colonizers. That may be the big leap so
| to speak.
| Causality1 wrote:
| If you can send a weapon you can probably send some kind
| of Von Neumann probe with genetic and cultural data to
| create a seed colony
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Not really, the weapon does not need to slow down. If its
| just a big enough chunk of rock that is aimed at a planet
| and it speeds up the whole way reaching some impressive
| fraction of the speed of light before impact, the only
| hard part is the math to aim it. We are reasonably close
| now to being able to strap some engines on an chunk of
| rock and send it on its way randomly in one direction. We
| are very far away from being able to start a seed colony
| in another solar system.
| syops wrote:
| I don't see why that necessarily follows and I don't see
| why one would want to send such a probe. It does nothing
| for me if I can send a probe to start humanity on another
| planet when I have no connection to said planet and won't
| be able to see the result or have a connection to that
| colony. In the dark forest view one would never seed such
| a colony as they will quickly become competitors.
| Causality1 wrote:
| You don't think species chauvinism is a thing? If I had
| to lose an interstellar war and be wiped out I'd prefer
| it to be a human offshoot doing it. At least that way my
| species survives.
| syops wrote:
| In the dark forest view it's best to just kill off the
| opponent and not replace them with a potential new
| opponent.
| V-2 wrote:
| Becoming truly detectable - on a cosmic scale - might require a
| higher technological level than our current one.
|
| Attaining that technological level could be inherently linked
| with the ability to realize the dangers to begin with.
| evrydayhustling wrote:
| As other commenters have said, we can't take our own viewpoint
| as an example of what kinds of civilizations _survive_ because
| our technological age is so young.
|
| But IMO Dark Forest is bunk anyway, because it assumes that
| projecting power over interstellar distances is easier than
| defending yourself. That's not true within terrestrial history
| ... even though the arrival of colonists was massively
| disruptive to populations in (for example) the Americas, they
| couldn't have outright destroyed them. To survive, they had to
| trade and mingle with their neighbors, ultimately changing both
| cultures.
|
| The sequels to The Three Body Problem kind of discuss this, and
| extend the dark forest idea to consider that any population
| that splits off from you is now a dark forest alien. I find
| that crazy xenophobic and ultimately an impractical black and
| white view of self vs other. On Earth, successful civilizations
| have been capable of trade and cultural exchange in addition to
| force.
| bobcostas55 wrote:
| >because it assumes that projecting power over interstellar
| distances is easier than defending yourself
|
| This seems really obviously true to me. Accelerating a rock
| to relativistic speeds is pretty easy, defending against a
| rock potentially coming from anywhere in space traveling at
| relativistic speeds is extremely difficult.
| gilbetron wrote:
| > Accelerating a rock to relativistic speeds is pretty easy
|
| Huh? How? I haven't seen any proposal that doesn't start
| with the assumption that we can inject a rock with a
| preposterous amount of energy let alone hit (in
| astronomical scales) a ridiculously small target, not to
| mention navigate all the gravity wells in between.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| Multistage rocket using ion engines. Remember this is
| over interstellar distances (>4 lightyears), so you have
| multiple years, if not decades or centuries to
| accellerate.
|
| This does get back to the "Why didn't we RKKV it millions
| of years before intellegent life even existed, much less
| had a opportunity to hide, based on biosignatures in the
| atmosphere?", though.
| evrydayhustling wrote:
| IANAAstrophysicist but it seems like targeting that rock
| gets proportionally hard with the speed and distance.
| Throwing a dart and hitting an ant on the other side of the
| world, etc.
|
| And the other side of that equation is: does the species
| who can do that have anything to fear from us? Or does the
| same technology make them likely able to stay ahead on
| defense, making it uninteresting to destroy us?
|
| Three Body Problem introduces all this dimension folding
| tech that makes being the first to strike totally dominate.
| But the closest equivalent on Earth hasn't (yet) led to
| nuclear holocaust, because preventing others from getting
| the tech and establishing mutual detente with those who do
| has been better for each actor.
| Retric wrote:
| We can already hit tiny (Ed: planet sized) targets at
| interstellar distances. Planets are relatively speaking
| quite large targets especially if you're tossing several
| rocks.
|
| This stuff doesn't need sci-fi style new physics, just
| the kind of infrastructure we could actually build.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| ....we have never hit anything at _interstellar_
| distances, which are several orders of magnitude farther
| than _interplanetary_ distances.
| Retric wrote:
| I didn't say we have, just that we _can._
|
| The closest Star is ~268,770 AU where voyager 1 is only
| 152.6 AU. However, being able to target a probe within 50
| feet at 150AU, means hitting a planet sized target at
| 4.25 light years. Building a probe large enough and fast
| enough to do significant damage at the other side is the
| hard part, not targeting.
|
| Calculating where a planet sized object would be by the
| time our probe got there is a different story.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Voyager is not traveling a relativistic speeds. We could
| definitely defend against someone sending voyager at us.
| Retric wrote:
| That's moving the goalposts. I said we could hit a planet
| at those distances not that we can create a relativistic
| impactor.
| edgyquant wrote:
| No it isn't since the whole topic here is that any
| civilization capable of accelerating an object to
| relativistic speeds and hitting a target from light years
| away is capable of defending against one. We can send
| voyager to target an object on the other side of the
| solar system but we are also perfectly able to defend
| against a potential voyager.
|
| Just because you now claim to not be addressing the
| actual goal at hand doesn't mean I moved the goalpost; if
| anything you're now implying you did.
| Retric wrote:
| Voyager 1 isn't a weapon so defending against it is kind
| of a meaningless argument. The Parker Soar probe is
| aiming for 0.064% the speed of light and covered in
| scientific instruments and shielding. So that's arguably
| a solid baseline of what we could do in terms of speed.
| Even at those speeds we are still talking 8,000 years to
| the closest planet making it a poor weapon.
|
| Still, I doubt we could detect a barrage of incoming
| 0.0005c weapons designed for minimal levels of stealth in
| time to do anything about it.
| evrydayhustling wrote:
| What tech are you thinking of? Remember it's not just the
| distance but the speed. How would we course correct a
| relativistic object once the target was close enough to
| estimate the desired change?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, you do that with the same kind of engines that
| propels them at relativistic speed.
|
| Anyway, it's not a target and forget situation, because
| relativistic ships get a (relatively) lot of drag in
| space.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Right, if you have the tech to allow you to course
| correct an object traveling at relativistic speeds you
| have the tech to defend against on by moving it out of
| the way.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Yep, that's probably correct. Even more because you can
| just throw something into the projectile too, and destroy
| it... And they can throw something into your projectile,
| and etc.
|
| I don't think anybody can make any claim on what side is
| easier. But targeting the attack does not seem to be the
| hard part.
| Retric wrote:
| The belief is that detecting the attack in time to do
| anything makes defense more difficult. Your warning is
| limited by light speed, so detecting something moving
| .99c at 100 AU and you get just over 7 minutes to
| respond.
|
| Worse, it doesn't need to be some solid object. A loose
| field of debris 1,000 miles wide could sterilize a planet
| with enough mass and enough velocity.
| gilbetron wrote:
| > Well, you do that with the same kind of engines that
| propels them at relativistic speed.
|
| Which don't exist except as fantasy, and even most of the
| fantasy ones wouldn't work for targeting adjustments.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > defending against a rock potentially coming from anywhere
| in space traveling at relativistic speeds is extremely
| difficult.
|
| Also, while 'proper' stealth is difficult, you can make the
| rock pretty close to invisible for practical purposes by
| coating it in vantablack and cooling it to liquid helium
| temperatures.
| roenxi wrote:
| Fortunately, it is possible to imagine other scenarios. For
| example; it would take relatively little energy to deflect
| such a missile and there is likely to be a lot of time to
| detect it's incoming presence assuming that some sort of
| planet-like mass is required to host all the technology to
| create a relativistic speed accelerating engine.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 1) I think you're underestimating the difficulty of
| accelerating any massive object to relativistic speeds, 2)
| doing so with enough accuracy to hit a relatively small
| moving target many light-years away is not exactly trivial,
| 3) a civilization with the capability to accelerate a
| massive object to relativistic speeds is probably also
| capable of building self-sufficient artificial habitats
| around its star, which is a lot of targets you'd have to
| take out for complete obliteration.
|
| So in summation, I think defending against an incoming
| relativistic rock is at least as easy as using relativistic
| rocks to obliterate a distant civilization.
| riffraff wrote:
| another thing: I believe at relativistic speeds hitting
| any debris in your path would cause a pretty large BOOM,
| and for a multi-lightyear route that seems somewhat
| risky.
| ping_pong wrote:
| You're definitely not thinking creatively enough.
|
| You don't need to hit the planet directly with anything,
| all you need to do is destabilize the orbit of all the
| planets or even just the Earth itself. You could send a
| gravity wave for example, that would cause the Earth's
| near circular orbit to shift to a very eliptical orbit.
| The vast change in temperatures would kill all life on
| the planet, and then you could come and mine all the
| resources that you needed and leave.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| If you have the capability of engineering such a gravity
| wave then Earth's resources aren't worth your time.
| mentalpiracy wrote:
| Resources not the point here, the point is removing the
| possibility that our civ could ever be a risk to them
| ping_pong wrote:
| > On Earth, successful civilizations have been capable of
| trade and cultural exchange in addition to force.
|
| Forget about what monstrosities we have done to other human
| civilizations throughout history. Instead, think about what
| we have done to animals. We have hunted many animals out of
| existence, or we have farmed them and made them basically the
| equivalent of the Matrix, sources of energy and food.
|
| We are trying to eradicate mosquitoes for crying out loud,
| and entire species, without giving it a second thought. I
| will use insecticide to kill today entire colonies of ants
| without blinking.
|
| All it takes is for one advanced alien civilisation to come
| across us and deem us the equivalent of their mosquitoes to
| eradicate us and take all the resources from the Earth.
| That's the whole point of the Dark Forest theory. If there's
| an infinite number of civilisations out there, and one of
| them is so advanced that we are insects to them, why wouldn't
| they just exterminate us, or use us as food?
| tjalfi wrote:
| John Varley's Eight Worlds[0] series has an alien species
| called the Invaders. They invaded Earth to protect
| cetaceans from the effects of human civilization.
|
| The Invaders divide sentient life into three tiers -
| species like themselves that evolve in gas giants,
| cetaceans, and vermin; we're in the third category.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Worlds
| saberdancer wrote:
| We are early in our "Space age". It's possible that
| inexperienced civilizations emit their position only to start
| hiding after realizing the dangers. Other possibility is that
| we are in a short period until we are wiped out because we
| broadcast our position.
|
| All of this would drastically reduce number of visible
| civilizations at any time making the detection of civilizations
| much less likely.
| ericmay wrote:
| I don't think the Dark Forest principle asserts that all
| civilizations adhere to it. We might simply be the naive (or
| stupid) ones that get destroyed. That wouldn't discredit the
| hypothesis.
|
| We are also the only civilization we know of so we again may
| just be the dumb ones with a sample size of 1.
| wydfre wrote:
| There is no way to underestimate the stupidity of people in
| groups, and our eusocial stupidity _might_ be unique to our
| species.
|
| If someone knocked on your door, quite unexpectedly, in the
| middle of the night, can I err on the idea that you would be
| quite panic-struck?
|
| But if humanity got a signal from another civilization
| tomorrow, do you think it is safe to err on folks being quite
| happy?
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| > If someone knocked on your door, quite unexpectedly, in the
| middle of the night, can I err on the idea that you would be
| quite panic-struck?
|
| Quite likely, but only because the socially acceptable
| reasons to knock on someone's door in the middle of the night
| are usually something pretty bad. I wouldn't fear that
| they're attacking me. I would fear whatever they are waking
| me up to tell me about.
| riffraff wrote:
| > If someone knocked on your door, quite unexpectedly, in the
| middle of the night, can I err on the idea that you would be
| quite panic-struck?
|
| But if a stranger knocks on your door in the middle of the
| day you might just open up and say "no thanks, I don't want
| your pamphlet/vacuum/encyclopedia".
|
| I mean, even if a stranger knocks, it seems weird to kill
| them assuming they're dangerous, even if we have "don't let a
| stranger in" etched in our collective consciousness.
| abecedarius wrote:
| > This particular proposed resolution to Fermi's Paradox question
| is a very recent addition. It takes its name from the novel The
| Dark Forest
|
| The same idea was in Gregory Benford's novel _In the Ocean of
| Night_ in the 1970s.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| To me the most likely back of the napkin answer to the Fermi
| paradox is that aliens are elsewhere in time. The Milky Way
| galaxy is about 100,000 light years across but about 13.5 billion
| years old. So it's like 135,000x deeper in the time direction
| than the distance direction.
|
| We're in the light cones of all the stars we can see, and as far
| as we know, we can't get out of them. If a civilization ended
| even 100 years earlier than our equivalent "now" in their light
| cone, we wouldn't have seen them. And if they became visible even
| 1 year later than our equivalent "now," we would not have seen
| them yet.
|
| We're proceeding through time at 1 sec per sec and basically if
| we're going to see an alien civilization at this point, I think
| the only way would be if one happens to achieve the necessary
| technology to be detected while we're looking at it. If there
| were existing civilizations that were easy to see, we would have
| seen them already.
|
| I think it's far more likely we will confirm alien life first by
| indirect means, for example spectroscopically detecting free
| atmospheric oxygen on an exoplanet, or finding tiny fossils on
| Mars.
| kadoban wrote:
| If true, that ends up meaning that alien civilizations are
| short-lived, right? That doesn't bode well for us.
| hashkb wrote:
| We're on a steady path to extinction, no doubt.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| Generalization. Would be interesting discussion with
| details. Pop is growing. What's your concern - global
| warming, fertility rates, pollution, nuclear arsenal,
| running out of resources? Doesn't seem like we are doing
| that badly and that pop can't drop if get below renewable
| resource level or adjust to new ways of making energy/food,
| etc.
|
| Does seem likely that on an extremely long time scale, we
| need to get multi-planetary, which is "realistic" if we
| give a reasonable time frame of, say, 10,000 years.
|
| As far as the sun dying, that's beyond even parent point's
| timeline. This is very things start to get questionable if
| we never get to even .1 of c (e.g. Project Orion
| "realistic" estimates). Alpha Centauri is relative close at
| 4.something ly, but other "potentially habitable/useful"
| star systems are way out there.
| sha256kira wrote:
| Agreed. The great filter and collapse theory in general
| are fascinating in theory and can motivate some great
| positive action but they can't undermine the fact that
| humans beings are doing better than they've ever done in
| our history by almost every imaginable metric.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Plus humans are extremely adaptable. Even before we
| invented agriculture, people had colonized the whole
| planet, except for Antarctica. It would be hard to kill
| us all off.
| not_jd_salinger wrote:
| > humans are extremely adaptable
|
| This is a strange claim I see repeated over and over, but
| it has very little evidence to justify it. The only piece
| of evidence people present is:
|
| > people had colonized the whole planet, except for
| Antarctica
|
| This is true of a fairly large number of organisms on
| Earth.
|
| On top of this humans have only been around for ~200,000
| years, that's not long at all. Humans have not survived a
| single mass extinction event.
|
| So far we've seen humans travel around a planet that has
| been relatively stable for that period of time. There
| have been plenty of species that have traveled around
| with us that didn't even need to rely on extra tools,
| clothing or the use of energy to survive.
|
| Humans share several vulnerabilities with other megafauna
| that have all gone extinct. A major one is a fairly long
| gestation, plus small number of offspring per generation.
| Human young likewise need tremendous amounts of care and
| energy to raise to mature adulthood. Additionally human
| have fairly high energy requirements to support their
| complex brains.
|
| We've seen exponential rise in human population only
| because humans have had access to excessive amount of
| non-renewable, high-energy density sources of energy.
|
| It just happens that humans have lived on a planet that
| has mostly been within survivable temperature changes,
| with historic climate changes happening on time scales
| that lead to easy migration. As you pointed out, the one
| continent that does not have an environment that supports
| human life remains empty.
|
| Humans can't survive a wet bulb temperature of 35C. Until
| just recently we never saw that temperature on this
| planet. As we see more and more places reach that
| temperature more often, I suspect we'll see how frail
| human adaptability is.
| Corazoor wrote:
| In comparison to most other mammals (including the
| neanderthals), we are pretty awesome at adaption.
| Probably even better than bacteria, all things
| considered.
|
| That is because we possess multiple different ways of
| adapting to our enviroment:
|
| genetic
|
| during childhood
|
| acclimatization
|
| culture and technology
|
| This link provides a nice summary:
| https://www2.palomar.edu/anthro/adapt/adapt_1.htm
| edgyquant wrote:
| > his is true of a fairly large number of organisms on
| Earth
|
| Is it though? How many other large, multicellular,
| organisms live on every continent without humans having
| brought them there?
| zabzonk wrote:
| Seals. Birds.
| nradov wrote:
| But we don't see the same species of seals or birds
| everywhere. There are different species which evolved to
| survive on each continent. Whereas humans are a single
| worldwide species.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Birds migrate from one place to the other they don't live
| on every continent all year round. Even if we take these
| though (and as the other commenter said they aren't the
| same species in every continent) that still leaves a
| total of 3 out of how many thousands, millions, of
| multicellular organisms on the planet.
| not_jd_salinger wrote:
| > the fact that humans beings are doing better than
| they've ever done in our history by almost every
| imaginable metric.
|
| That's because we have had ready access to insanely
| abundant high-energy density source of energy.
|
| The non-fossil fuel supported carrying capacity of the
| planet for humans is estimated to be somewhere around 1
| billion people. When the fuel runs out (if we don't cook
| ourselves first), that will collapse.
|
| It is nothing intrinsic about humans that have lead to
| our recent success, just access to lots of nearly free
| energy.
|
| edit: why the downvotes? Is there even anything
| controversial in these statements? HN's fear of bad news
| is getting out of hand.
| myrmidon wrote:
| What is your source for the 1 billion estimate? Because
| that seems completely, non-credibly *low* to me.
|
| I also strongly believe that we could cover _all_ our
| energy needs with renewable sources within a few decades
| if we really wanted to (even assuming no significant
| advances in tech), and this seems mostly non-disputed to
| me (because that is literally what nation-states are
| currently planning /doing).
|
| > Is there even anything controversial in these
| statements?
|
| Yes. Your statements seem not credible to me and you cite
| no sources.
| not_jd_salinger wrote:
| 1 billion is a rough estimate based populations prior to
| the massive boom in the industrial revolution that saw
| massive changes in the way agriculture is done. It could
| easily be 2 billion or so, but definitely not 7.8
| billion. You can see the population history here[0.]
|
| To see the powerful impact of fossil fuels on carrying
| capacity you'll notice there's an important inflection
| point around 1920-1930. This is because of the advent of
| the Haber process[1] which allows us to use fossil fuels
| to create nitrogen based fertilizers.
|
| Lest you doubt the impact of the Haber process just look
| at trends in corn yield per acre since then [2]. It's
| truly remarkable. Additional gains there are from other
| industrialized, fossil fuel driven agricultural process.
|
| The Haber process _requires_ hydrocarbons. In the
| wikipedia article you can see that it consumes 3-5% of
| the worlds natural gas production and 1-2% of the global
| energy supply.
|
| We have completely disrupted the natural nitrogen cycle
| [4] and so would be unable to produce anywhere near as
| much food without fossil fuels. Because we have disrupted
| this cycle it's not even obvious that we could go back to
| a world of pre-fossil fuel agriculture.
|
| So those are just some bit of information about my claims
| but let's take a look at yours:
|
| > we could cover all our energy needs with renewable
| sources within a few decades if we really wanted to...
| this seems mostly non-disputed to me
|
| This is _wildly_ disputed, and I don 't know anyone who
| credibly believes this without invoking "magic" future
| technology.
|
| For starters we haven't replaced fossil fuels with
| "renewables" at all so far. We've just used them to
| supplement our energy needs. You can see here [4] that
| global fossil fuel consumption has continued to rise.
|
| Then it is important to separate electricity from the
| more general subject of energy. Currently only 20% of
| global energy usage is electricity generation [5]. So
| even if you replaced the entire grid with renewables over
| night you would still be missing the vast majority of
| energy demands.
|
| We currently have no viable pathway for renewable energy
| in transportation. Alice Friedman has more notes on this
| than I could ever fit in a comment [6]. Transportation
| inherently requires high energy density fuels, and
| outside of passenger vehicles, battery technology does
| not have the density required for industrial shipping.
|
| It worth looking at our national energy flows to get a
| good sense of just how little of the energy we use comes
| from renewables [7].
|
| But even if we look just at the electrical grid, in the
| US, we have some very obvious problems with "all" our
| needs. As you probably know, wind and solar are
| intermittent power sources that requires fossil fuel
| powered "peaker" plants to provide energy in down times.
|
| This had two problems. One you need energy storage
| technology that we do not currently have (you cannot use
| grid scale lithium batters, pumped hydro has geological
| constraints, molten salts only work with concentrated
| solar, compressed air requires decommissioned oil field,
| etc).
|
| The other problem is that even if you had perfect storage
| you need to now more than double the total energy
| production so you can fill those batteries.
|
| The should be enough sources for you to get started, but
| I have feeling I'll still get down votes and "hand wavy"
| explanations of how it will all work out.
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#/media/
| File:W...
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
|
| 2. https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/Yie
| ldTren...
|
| 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_impact_on_the_nitr
| ogen_c...
|
| 4. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-
| substitutio...
|
| 5. https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-
| outlook-2019/electr...
|
| 6. https://www.resilience.org/resilience-author/alice-
| friedeman...
|
| 7. https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/char
| ts/Ene...
| myrmidon wrote:
| Thanks for explaining how you arrived at your numbers.
|
| > I have feeling I'll still get down votes and "hand
| wavy" explanations
|
| Let me turn this around: you are getting downvotes (not
| from me) because _your_ 1 billion population carrying
| estimate in a post-fossil age is _implausible_ and
| borderline disingenuous:
|
| 1) It assumes that pre-industrial agricultural output is
| the maximum that our planet can sustain. Which is
| completely off for a multitude of reasons:
|
| - Genetic improvements to cultivars still fully apply
|
| - Pesticides won't cease to exist
|
| - Automation in harvesting/monitoring also won't go away
|
| 2) There is no reason to assume that we're _anywhere
| close_ to peak sustainable agricultural output, neither
| in pre-industrial times NOR now.
|
| 3) Furthermore, it implies that land utilization,
| cultivar choice and consumer behavior in general would
| stay similar/comparable regardless of cataclysmic change
| in supply/demand (pricing). Which is obviously wrong: If
| avocado price went up to 50$/kg then people would just
| put potatoes on their toast instead, and total
| agricultural output (in calories) would "inexplicably"
| increase.
|
| Regarding power:
|
| Renewables (solar/wind) are a perfectly fine source of
| primary energy. Storage/grid stability does not depend on
| "technology we do not currently have"--Batteries and
| inverters are perfectly usable, mature technologies--but
| right now slapping down natural gas plants is simply
| cheaper. This is exclusively a matter of price/ROI, and
| installation could be jumpstarted immediately if there
| was the political will to pay for it (and thats not
| blaming politicians exclusively to be clear--average
| citizen is simply unwilling to pay 1$/kWh right now for
| residential electricity).
|
| > Renewable energy in transportation
|
| Friedman selfdescribes as "energy sceptic" which is
| already...unfavorable... to me and after stumbling over
| "running out of fossils is gonna solve climate change
| better than anything else" (transcribed), I gave up on
| the author completely;
|
| Viable pathways are:
|
| - Batteries
|
| - Biofuel
|
| - Fuel cells
|
| - Hydrogen in combustion engines
|
| We literally _built_ all of those already, but same story
| here: It 's less cost efficient than burning diesel right
| now, so why would anyone do it.
| beervirus wrote:
| On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone
| drops to zero.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| I am Jack's existential dread
| delecti wrote:
| Sure _eventually_ , but there's no clear indication if
| that's 10 years away, 10 billion years away, or a mere
| technicality as our descendants evolve into something that
| counts as a separate species.
| not_jd_salinger wrote:
| We're currently undergoing the largest mass extinction
| event that will easily rank in the top 6 of life on this
| planet and could possibly compete with the end-permian.
| What makes you think we could possibly survive? Because
| we're the cause? Plenty of species in the past that have
| caused extinction events also perished.
|
| It seems far more questionable to assume we _won 't_ risk
| extinction in the geological near term. The parent is
| downvoted more out of existential fear rather than an
| honest assessment of the situation.
| delecti wrote:
| I think the parent comment was downvoted because it's not
| really contributing anything besides pessimism.
|
| As for us, I don't doubt the likelihood of a serious mass
| extinction, including possibly a severe drop in human
| population, but I can't see it being so severe as to
| cause an existential threat to us. No other species on
| this planet has had the ability to change the environment
| to suit it, or the ease of mobility to move where they
| can survive. Short of earth being entirely incompatible
| with complex life on the surface, I don't see humanity
| disappearing because of climate change.
| coldacid wrote:
| If we don't expand beyond Earth, we've got maybe 700
| million years tops, since past then the sun's changes
| will make multi-cellular life, if not all life, on Earth
| impossible.
| chadwittman wrote:
| Read more about the Great Filter, it's probable it's ahead of
| us.
| riffraff wrote:
| is it _probable_?
|
| AFA we know we've been insanely lucky up to this point (as
| earthling life we went past multiple mass extinctions, we
| got multi-cellular life, multiple brains iterations, a
| society which still didn't wipe itself out etc)
|
| What makes it more likely for the filter to be ahead of us
| rather than behind us?
| tshaddox wrote:
| Is it more likely that I'm immortal or that I simply have
| thus far avoided things that would have killed me?
| riffraff wrote:
| You know that most people are not immortal, but if you
| had no prior about the mortality of mankind it would be
| reasonable to expect you're immortal.
|
| Few people expect to die at any specific day, they just
| know they will die at some point because mortality is a
| given.
| caeril wrote:
| Modern civilization is _extremely_ dependent on fossil
| fuels. We 've already passed peak conventional oil
| production, and we're now surviving on EXTRAORDINARY
| technical means of enhanced oil recovery.
|
| If we can't make the complete transition to renewables in
| the next thirty years, it's game over for a VERY long
| time. Future civilizations won't enjoy the benefit of
| Spindletop. Cheap energy sources won't be available near
| the surface of the crust for another > 50 million years.
|
| We won't go extinct, but it will be the 18th century for
| a very long time and nobody will leave this rock during
| that time.
|
| The Great Filter is right here, in front of us, in our
| lifetimes.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Cheap energy sources won 't be available near the
| surface of the crust for another > 50 million years._
|
| Wrong. We already have one: nuclear energy.
| caeril wrote:
| That's a good point. It's pretty easy to construct and
| maintain fission reactors without fossil fuels. I bet
| enriching uranium was a snap in the 18th century, too. It
| will be even easier even getting to the enrichment phase
| in the future, with accessible ores about 30% as rich as
| they were when the nuclear age began.
|
| Looking forward to the fleet of electric concrete trucks
| carrying electrically-manufactured concrete loaded with
| batteries that were produced with lithium carbonate dug
| out of the ground by electric excavation rigs.
|
| All of this construction work will also not be disrupted
| by any social unrest resulting from 3 billion people
| starving to death because the Haber process no longer has
| enough cheap feedstock to sustain modern agricultural
| processes.
|
| Thanks for educating me.
| pdonis wrote:
| Your snark is misplaced. All of the issues you raise
| apply to _any_ source of energy, including "renewables".
| The difference is, "renewables" (a) are not controllable,
| and (b) don't have nearly enough capacity to support a
| global civilization. And if you're worried about social
| unrest, by far the best way to ensure it is to refuse to
| make use of an obvious source of plentiful energy to help
| maintain and improve people's standard of living, and
| instead insist on keeping billions of people in poverty
| in order to satisfy your ideological preconceptions.
| Moodles wrote:
| Carl Sagan thought this, though he lived during the cold war
| so it's not surprising he did.
| hnbad wrote:
| Considering where climate change is heading, it's
| surprising anyone doesn't think this.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I agree in our case but this wouldnt be universal. Life
| may thrive in very hot planets if their evolutionary
| track was different.
| scarmig wrote:
| Climate change is very real and worth addressing, but
| it's extremely unlikely to wipe out human civilization.
| It's just going to be costly and kill millions, not
| billions.
| Pokepokalypse wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's extremely unlikely. Maybe not the
| primary effects won't kill us. But when nations start to
| struggle with the primary effects, the resource shortages
| are going to cause conflict - which will almost certainly
| lead to wars, with these weapons, which will kill
| billions.
| ses1984 wrote:
| Climate change by itself could be extremely unlikely to
| wipe out human civilization but it could be the catalyst
| that sets other events in motion like nuclear war.
| miltondts wrote:
| Extremely unlikely to wipe out all humans. I agree.
| Current civilization, I'm not so sure. For the reasoning:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IESYMFtLIis
| darthrupert wrote:
| Climate change doesn't have to directly kill us all. It
| could be the trigger to something else that does.
| hnbad wrote:
| Can you clarify what you mean by "millions"? The Syrian
| civil war is estimated to have killed just short of half
| a million people. The pandemic easily has a global death
| toll of roughly 4 million people so far. The Chalisa
| famine of 1783/1784 is estimated to have killed 11
| million people. The Spanish flu killed at least 17
| million people, though some of the more dramatizing
| estimates place it closer to 100 million. According to
| some researchers, climate change is already killing
| 100,000 a year[1]. So I assume you're not thinking of
| just seven or eight digits unless you're exceedingly
| optimistic.
|
| Climate change will make parts of the world inhabitable
| that are currently populated by humans. It will also
| result in crop failures, which will cause famines. In
| some cases formerly native crops will no longer be
| supported by the changing local climate or farmland may
| become completely unusable. Potable water will become
| harder to source. Water contamination is a source of many
| deadly diseases.
|
| Even if we assume most of the deaths will be concentrated
| in places like Africa or the Indian subcontinent, the
| global economy relies on these places for resources and
| cheap labor. People in ongoing climate catastrophes also
| don't tend to stay put and die in an orderly fashion,
| they become refugees or riot against their governments.
| Things can get politically messy even in the nations next
| door as humans tend to be uncomfortable with political
| chaos and mass deaths.
|
| But unlike the Spanish flu, or the potato famine, or
| COVID, climate change is not a temporary blip that
| happens and then goes away. If all the carriers of the
| plague have died, nobody dies from the plague unless they
| get infected handling the dead. Famines can starve
| millions to death but once there's another harvest the
| survivors have food again. Climate change isn't like
| that. If climate change creates a drought, that's not
| just a drought, that's now dry season and it will be dry
| season every year from now.
|
| There are currently 7.8 billion humans. There's
| absolutely no reason to believe climate change can't kill
| billions, especially once it's managed to kill the first
| hundreds of millions.
|
| Keep in mind that it's not about "addressing" climate
| change. It's not a moldy bathroom tile that you need to
| clean up or replace before the mold spreads everywhere.
| It's a fire our entire way of life is fueling every
| single day. We know what needs to be done to slow it down
| to survivable levels (or at least levels that are lethal
| for less than 1% of us) but we can't just pass
| legislation or appeal to personal responsibility to do
| that because it involves changes that would be economical
| suicide for anyone doing it alone. The world economy is
| playing a game of chicken with each other and nobody is
| bluffing.
|
| [1]: https://grist.org/climate/how-many-people-has-
| climate-change...
| catillac wrote:
| New equilibriums will form. Where it was once one
| climate, another will be, and the native crops that can
| no longer live in the first climate will be supplanted by
| new ones that can survive in the new one. This won't be
| the case everywhere, but this sort of adaptation will
| happen. You're talking as if everything will remain
| static except the climate.
|
| Additionally, the entire worlds population at relatively
| sparse city density (say, Houston) can fit in like 1/3 of
| the United States.
|
| That isn't to say that climate change isn't a big deal.
| It is one of the biggest deals and quite grave. But you
| don't really propose any solutions. What you allude to
| though won't happen, that everyone works together to
| address the issues. My speculation is that if our
| technology doesn't progress fast enough, billions will
| die, but if tech does happen to progress fast enough then
| that will be mitigated.
|
| That isn't to say that the world couldn't use a strong
| reduction in population. But given that we are causing
| this, I feel particularly bad for the wildlife whose
| habitats will be unlivable to them through no fault of
| their own and not through natural processes.
| bob33212 wrote:
| Civilizations are only detectable for a short period of time.
| Once they understand physics, they no longer need radio waves
| or Dyson spheres or to travel through what we call spacetime.
| yreg wrote:
| Why wouldn't they need megastructures and travel once they
| understood enough physics?
| bob33212 wrote:
| Space and time may be emergent, we don't know, all we do
| know is that our current model of physics is missing
| something. Quantum Gravity for example and We don't know
| what happens inside a black hole either.
| yreg wrote:
| That's a non-answer though.
|
| Do you mean they are guaranteed to discover another
| "realm" and move to it?
|
| Why? It might not be possible, no matter how much physics
| one knows. Or do you take the Fermi paradox itself as a
| proof of the solution?
| bob33212 wrote:
| Yes, it seems that the Fermi paradox implies that other
| civs progress beyond what we consider signs of
| intelligent life. The great filter seems less likely as
| we get close to colonizing other planets, and then other
| solar systems.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I question your use of "implies" there. It implies no
| such thing. What you suggest is one possible answer,
| nothing more.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Yup, to me it implies a darker problem, that FLT is
| something that can't be surpassed. All civs might advance
| to that understanding and decide to maybe just occupy
| nearby solar systems and nothing more.
|
| We may not talk to them simply because it's both
| incredibly expensive and will yield nothing more than
| "Yup, we're stuck here, so are you".
| yreg wrote:
| Why wouldn't they send out autonomous
| research/exploration vessels? At a sufficient tech stage
| it's trivial.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Sure, they could, but imagine they are 10,000 light years
| away. Such a craft would need to travel for a long time
| before it could communicate back it's findings.
| aetherson wrote:
| Short lived on those timescales, yes. But not necessarily
| short lived in terms of our perspective.
|
| If we imagine that in the last 5 billion years, there have
| been a good solid 10,000 post-industrial civilizations, and
| each of those civilizations has lasted 10,000 years (in the
| post-industrial stage where they're detectable), then that
| implies that of the last 5,000,000,000 years, 100,000,000 of
| them have been host to a post-industrial civilization: a
| given year has on average 0.02 currently present
| civilizations in it.
|
| Now, this hypothesis does probably imply that significantly
| interstellar civilizations are impossible, since it seems
| like if you've colonized say 20 stars, what disaster could
| possibly end your civilization?
|
| (I think the most likely scenario is that we're the only
| civilization ever to have developed in the Milky Way.
| Everything else seems like it assumes a lot of additional
| stuff.)
| miltondts wrote:
| > if you've colonized say 20 stars, what disaster could
| possibly end your civilization?
|
| Unfortunately, war with another civilization.
| xwolfi wrote:
| But maybe war is a territorial animal's instinct and once
| we have shaken up a bit more of our animality, we'd
| understand this makes no sense ?
|
| If we can control resource, exchange knowledge and
| techniques, and reproduce automatically (for instance if
| we become small electronic machines rather than the
| current inefficient chemical process we are), "war" might
| probably sounds both ridiculous and totally ineffective,
| both to cull us if we're abstract enough, and to cull
| potential enemies, probably just as impossible to reach
| "physically".
| ithkuil wrote:
| OTOH animals evolved those instincts because they worked
| in the game-theoretical circumstances that competition
| with other animals.
|
| Perhaps we can shake off many emotional components of war
| (which would make war an irrational option in many of the
| cases that our monkey brain would have been dragged into)
| but that doesn't necessarily mean that war itself would
| be eradicated
| mLuby wrote:
| Animals are stuck in local maxima (betrayal in the
| Prisoner's Dilemma). A more evolved group might discover
| and be able to reach the global maximum (solidarity in
| the Prisoner's Dilemma). Imagine if tigers or sharks
| developed pack hunting, or the octopus became more pro-
| social.
|
| Also, multi-species symbiotic relationships are quite
| common in the animal kingdom. It would be surprising if
| that weren't true at other scales (and if it were limited
| to the sci-fi trope of "worker species, soldier species,
| leader species").
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| If the stars are reasonably close together a supernova
| would do it. Even a relatively distant supernova (like
| 30-40 light years) would likely render most planets
| inhabitable for a long time.
| aetherson wrote:
| I mean, maybe. Honestly hard for me to imagine war
| actually going on between two interstellar civilizations.
| But even if it did, it seems like in 99% of all cases,
| that would leave at least one of the two civilizations
| still around. We're looking for explanations, in this
| hypothesis, that leave 98% of all time with no
| civilizations.
| kadoban wrote:
| Maybe war between two spacefaring civilizations is too
| "easy". eg something like: throwing asteroids at ~the
| speed of light is necessarily a cheap thing to do once
| you're at that level, and everyone just dies.
|
| Like if on Earth nukes were something everyone could cook
| up in their backyard in an afternoon, we'd all be gone
| pretty quick.
|
| Not sure that really makes any sense though.
| tjalfi wrote:
| > Maybe war between two spacefaring civilizations is too
| "easy". eg something like: throwing asteroids at ~the
| speed of light is necessarily a cheap thing to do once
| you're at that level, and everyone just dies.
|
| _The Killing Star_ [0] and _Flying to Valhalla_ by
| Charles Pellegrino are based around the idea that it 's
| natural for a species to annihilate all other sentient
| species. The characters define three rules that an alien
| species may be operating by.
|
| Rule 1. Aliens will believe their survival is more
| important than our survival.
|
| Rule 2. Wimps don't become top dogs.
|
| Rule 3. Aliens will assume that the first two rules apply
| to us as well.
|
| [0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/The
| Killing...
| Supermancho wrote:
| Given the relative emptiness of observed space, im not
| convinced that a civilization A would try to annihilate
| all life but would maybe war with others in their light
| cone who threaten civA goals/expansion. If you can
| traverse interstellar space you can probably make home
| most anywhere further reducing the amount of potential
| conflict.
| kadoban wrote:
| How likely does it seem that if you can traverse
| interstellar space, your civilization splinters over time
| and your potential for internal conflict just grows
| without bound?
| pharke wrote:
| If you can traverse interstellar space you are pretty
| much required to "live off the land" as you go and
| especially so once you reach your destination. This means
| you possess the ability to produce all of the energy,
| food, material, etc. required for a civilization to exist
| from what is present in either interstellar space or a
| solar system. If we put our sci-fi hats on we can imagine
| a perfect system of recycling and matter conversion that
| can keep a massive generational ship functioning with the
| only input being hydrogen scooped from the space it
| crosses. If you possess that level of sophistication then
| you really could live anywhere. That gives you plenty of
| living space with little motivation to pre-emptively
| attack others.
| babelfish wrote:
| Spoilers for The Dark Forest and The Remembrance of
| Earth's Past Trilogy below.
|
| In the book that the OP article is based on, humanity is
| doing anything and everything to prevent/defend
| themselves against an alien invasion happening ~400 years
| in the future. The character who coins "Dark Forest"
| theory in the book proposes sending a 'spell' (just a
| signal containing coordinates) to a nearby star, which is
| then amplified throughout the universe via "Sci-Fi
| science". This reveals the location of the star, and
| shortly after the star is destroyed by some comet-sized
| object moving at the speed of light. It's later revealed
| that some other civilization listens for broadcasts on
| every spectrum, decodes them for coordinates, then
| destroys the ones that seem to have actually been sent by
| intelligent life.
|
| I thought this made perfect sense - why wouldn't another
| intelligent species do this if they possess the
| technology? I personally agree with "Dark Forest" theory
| and think that we should /never/ make first contact (lest
| we are destroyed), but if we were to attempt first
| contact, we should at the very least have a weapon like
| you described available to us first.
| pharke wrote:
| > why wouldn't another intelligent species do this if
| they possess the technology?
|
| I think the only question we can ask here is "Would we do
| this if we possessed the technology?". We only have
| ourselves as an example of intelligent life.
| 6510 wrote:
| Ours always rot from the inside out.
| ManBlanket wrote:
| There's the other end of a technology curve, when a
| civilization ceases use of an outdated piece of technology. In
| our case humanity is looking for radar because we're currently
| broadcasting it. Why would anyone continue using radar to
| communicate within a few years of quantum entangled data
| processing, capable instantly transmitting data instantaneously
| across vast distances? There might be a few living that rock
| star lifestyle of HAM radio operation and messenger pidgeons,
| but at that moment our civ would go narly completely dark to
| our sister civ's SETI program. All humanity's existence so far
| has been nothing but spark swallowed up by the darkness of
| time. Our use of radio a fart in the wind.
|
| This theory is incredibly type-zero-civ-pocentric. A species
| capable of interstellar travel will have mastered technologies
| we can't even comprehend. By the time humanity is able to
| meaningfully reach across the stars, we'll have spread life
| across our entire solar system and everything we'd ever need.
| Unlimited energy from our sun, a lush and verdant Venus and
| Mars, mining colonies across the solar system producing vast
| quantities of any desirable element, not to mention an Earth
| whose biosphere is a shining jewel - perpetually locked-in at
| peak biodiversity.
|
| Begs the question of what we would ever need from another civ,
| and furthermore what a similar civilization would ever want
| from a bunch of squatting troglodytes such as ourselves.
| tyfighter wrote:
| That's not possible. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-
| communication_theorem)
| anyonecancode wrote:
| This makes sense to me. I feel we're in a small room peeking
| through a tiny hole in the wall and asking why the outside
| world is so empty.
| magneticnorth wrote:
| And to add the evidence we do have; in the billions of years of
| life on earth, there has only been <200 years where any species
| had the will and the way to send deliberate communications into
| space. Observational evidence suggests that the time span of
| civilizations existing is vanishingly tiny compared to the
| vastness of time overall
| pharke wrote:
| This is the L constant of the Drake equation. Probably the
| hardest to find a value for until we've actually discovered
| other intelligent life or remains of such. The confounding part
| of it is that we can only guess at things that may end a
| civilization so completely that it will never recover. Things
| like the so called Great Filters, natural extinctions like
| impact events or gamma ray bursts, or other more speculative
| things that prevent expansion. The tricky part is that our
| existence seems to fly in the face of such events so far, is
| that mere luck or do all forms of intelligent life have enough
| sense to navigate around these problems? The last and most
| paradox defining part of the problem is that even if the
| tiniest fraction of civilizations can evade these filters then
| they should eventually be everywhere in the galaxy. Assuming
| the Copernican principle that we are not at a special place in
| the universe or time then there should have already been ample
| opportunity for such civilizations to develop and hence Fermi's
| question "Where is everybody?".
| kryogen1c wrote:
| > Great Filters, natural extinctions like impact events or
| gamma ray bursts
|
| you know what really alarms me? these things are only chances
| on a very, very short-time scale. they are inevitable, yet no
| one seems alarmed when meteors come between us and the moon
| and we dont see it coming until hours beforehand.
|
| sun bursts blowing out the electric grid, nuclear war,
| antiobotic resistance, crop and animal monoculture, climate
| change, natural resource depletion... taleb is right. we need
| an agent of chaos to make anti-fragility valuable. otherwise
| we learn the lesson the hard way. by dying.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| > you know what really alarms me? these things are only
| chances on a very, very short-time scale. they are
| inevitable, yet no one seems alarmed when meteors come
| between us and the moon and we dont see it coming until
| hours beforehand.
|
| That is why Elon is so hell bent on making humanity multi
| planetary.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Elon Musk has the same chance of making humanity multi-
| planetary as the Pharaohs did. We are still far away from
| any semblance of a chance to do so.
|
| Besides, anything at all that we can imagine hitting the
| earth (except a gamma ray burst or collision with another
| planet) would still leave the earth in a better shape
| than Mars is. It's entirely doubtful that humanity could
| be self-sustaining on Mars even in principle, it is
| certainly not possible with known technologies.
| EthanHeilman wrote:
| >It's entirely doubtful that humanity could be self-
| sustaining on Mars even in principle, it is certainly not
| possible with known technologies.
|
| Citation needed.
|
| What's the blocker here?
|
| Energy production on Mars? Why not Solar or Simple
| Stirling Engines.
|
| Food/Closed ecological systems? Hard, for sure yeah, but
| even not particularly well funded small ecosystems like
| Biosphere2 worked for several years.
|
| The biggest issue seems psychological.
| lisper wrote:
| > What's the blocker here?
|
| Human nature, apparently. Just about all large-scale
| human activities at the moment are predicated on
| exponential growth. We're nowhere near achieving a long-
| term stable steady-state here on earth. The odds of
| achieving that in a vastly more hostile environment are
| even lower.
| hutrdvnj wrote:
| Well, but Pharaohs couldn't shoot a car into space.
| lmohseni wrote:
| I don't think Elon could build a pyramid. He might be
| capable of tweeting about one though.
| iseanstevens wrote:
| He could certainly get a pyramid built. And that is the
| best you can do.
| zokula wrote:
| Elon Musk will use child slave labor to build a Pyramid.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I think people _are_ alarmed, but solutions to these
| problems are enormously costly and largely fictional. The
| techniques we have for living in space (or transiting
| through it) would not sustain us if we lost earth. They are
| enormously costly[1], which is fine for what we are doing,
| but we need multiple orders-of-magnitude improvement to be
| practically interstellar.
|
| On balance, I think we could spend more, but I also think
| diminishing returns is very real. Giving the wright
| brothers 100,000 workers to build copies of their planes
| would not have gotten us to the space shuttle much faster.
| Ironically, it could have slowed us down because of sunk
| cost fallacies.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/sim_kern/status/1411304471934685184
| e40 wrote:
| > I think people are alarmed
|
| I think your view is skewed. Every single person I've
| talked to about this as looked at me like they are bored.
| Of course, here on HN, I've found many like-minded
| people. That's great, but I think very few humans,
| especially humans in the power structures that run this
| planet, care about this issue.
| aeturnum wrote:
| > I think your view is skewed
|
| I suspect it's more that we have different definitions of
| how widely a feeling of alarm should spread before saying
| this. I agree the absolute number of people who are
| worried about the problem is small.
|
| I guess I think about it in terms of "what proportion of
| the population that would be directly involved in solving
| this problem"? I would suspect that is close to 100%.
| Anyone involved in space work is aware that we may we
| wiped out and would not like that to happen. Government
| leaders are also, I think, aware, but unconvinced that
| more resource expenditure would be meaningfully helpful.
| Given how difficult it's been to convince people to deal
| with a much cheaper & easier problem that is much more
| obvious and immediate (global climate change) I have
| trouble critiquing people for being insufficiently
| zealous about this issue.
| mikevin wrote:
| I think that's a pretty healthy reaction, pretty much all
| of human history took place in an environment where
| investing time an energy in thinking/caring about "the
| big picture"/"distant future" would drastically lower
| your chances of survival. Even today there's still plenty
| of people who have to worry about having something to eat
| tomorrow.
|
| We're slowly getting comfortable enough about our
| immediate situation, leaving room to start thinking on a
| bigger scale. But I think it takes actual effort to say:
| "ok brain, I understand our immediate situation is
| important but I think we've got that covered enough to
| allow us to start caring about the less immediate
| problems we might face"
|
| I'm a glass half full guy so maybe it's naive but I think
| we're actually doing pretty well. Climate change sucks
| and we're pretty slow to respond but you wouldn't expect
| a hunter/gatherer to be able to see the importance of
| fighting it. Our situation is different but the brain
| isn't all that different when it comes to prioritizing
| things to spend time/energy on. Obesity is a good example
| of what happens when you combine ancient instincts with
| modern situations.
|
| Same thing probably goes for racism. We're advanced
| enough to know better and responsible for our actions but
| we're dealing with a brain has evolved mostly during
| times where trusting other tribes and survival of the
| fittest were Incompatible. Xenophobia had some
| evolutionary benefit and now we have to deal with it's
| existence in a vastly different situation.
|
| Like I said, people should know better and have to be
| held responsible for their actions and we should never be
| comfortable with the slow rate of change. Still I like to
| remind myself every now and then that its amazing how
| much progress has already been made changing things that
| evolution hasn't had time to value yet.
|
| This turned out way longer than I expected but it's
| something I think about a lot. Hope you don't mind me
| using your comment to finally put some thoughts into
| words.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| It's much easier to traverse 1 year in time then 1 light year
| in space though
| toufka wrote:
| Is it? I can move all sorts of distances, in different
| directions, at all sorts of rates. It's surely harder to go
| certain speeds than others, and in certain directions than
| others. But to move 1 year in time - I only have one speed
| and one direction to move.
| ryandvm wrote:
| That and the fact that civilizations probably only broadcast EM
| radiation out into the void for a short period of time before
| they start getting into energy efficiency and switch over to
| more efficient communication technologies.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| I have heard (can't remember the source) that radar,
| especially military radar, continues to be a significant
| source of artificial-looking EM radiation leaving the Earth,
| even as radio and TV broadcasts have declined in power.
| cogman10 wrote:
| This is my theory.
|
| You look at human civilization and that's exactly what's
| happened. We started off by broadcasting everything as loud
| as we could (which isn't very loud) and we've slowly
| transitioned to signals that are both quieter and don't
| really survive escaping the atmosphere.
|
| I can't imagine an advanced species wouldn't follow a similar
| communications path. The only way we detect them is if they
| specifically target our spot in the sky with focused EM for a
| very long time, generations! After all, they have no clue
| when we would be in our evolutionary path.
|
| And for that to happen, the species would have to first find
| us. Not just find us, find us while we are still listening.
|
| And this is all with the assumption that FTL
| communication/observation is even a possibility (It likely
| isn't).
|
| IMO, the simplest answer is that FTL communication and travel
| is impossible. Advanced civilizations across the galaxy have
| all come to the same conclusion.
|
| We might be able to explore our own neighboring stars
| throughout generations but it's unlikely we'll be able to
| ever send a message to another civilization that will get
| there while they are listening (without spending huge amounts
| of power).
| xwolfi wrote:
| But if you pursue an evolution over millions of years, at
| some point we'll have to miniaturise. Imagine we can make
| fully conscious silicon - let's say in 200 000 years (6500
| human generations). At this point, we'd be tempted little
| by little to raise them as our intellectual children and
| find less and less need to make them with sperm and vagina.
|
| After a long while, there might be this great replacement,
| totally peaceful, that would lead these conscious organisms
| with a vastly superior intellectual efficiency to probably
| become very small and self centered and not behave like the
| territorial monkeys we are. What do you think a massively
| singular electronic intelligence will think when it notices
| a planet like ours ? "nuke them all and rape their women" ?
| This is monkey behavior that we still haven't fully shaken
| up.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Even broadcast emissions aren't detectable at long distances.
| If you parked an Arecibo-class telescope in orbit around
| Alpha Centauri the only signals you'd detect coming from
| Earth would be _intentional_ directional transmissions from
| an Arecibo-class (or Goldstone class) radar.
|
| Our television and radio broadcasts aren't detectable by an
| Arecibo-class telescope out much past Jupiter let alone
| outside the solar system. Even our high powered radar systems
| wouldn't be detectable out even half a light year from the
| solar system.
|
| The only civilizations that can be detected with a SETI-like
| program would be ones intentionally transmitting directional
| signals. Even then out past a thousand light years even a
| multi-terawatt (EIRP) signal would be difficult to detect.
|
| Like inverse square law is as unforgiving as the rocket
| equation. Anyone hand-waving either of those principals is
| not trying to have a meaningful discussion about interstellar
| communication or travel, they're just writing about science
| fiction.
| nikhilgk wrote:
| > Even then out past a thousand light years even a multi-
| terawatt (EIRP) signal would be difficult to detect.
|
| Not necessarily. Gravitational lensing may enable directed
| communication at much lower power levels :
| https://storkpaulo.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/gravitational-
| le...
| giantrobot wrote:
| Leaving the serious engineering difficulties involved in
| a solar gravitational lensing system aside, such a system
| doesn't necessarily help in picking up just random
| omnidirectional broadcasts from an ETI.
|
| Say we had an SGL telescope positioned such to image an
| Earth-sized planet we know is in orbit of Alpha Centauri
| A. For ease of math we'll say this Earth sized planet is
| at a distance such the solar constant is the same as
| Earth. So that's a total power received from the Sun of
| 1.74x10^17 watts and with the Earth's mean albedo of 0.3
| about 5.22x10^16 watts being reflected off into space.
|
| We can use our SGL to image the planet around Alpha
| Centauri because it's reflecting 52.2 _peta_ watts of
| sunlight out into space. So it takes the power of a star
| reflecting off a disc with a cross sectional area of
| 1.26x10^8 square kilometers for a proposed SGL system to
| detect and image a planet.
|
| The amount of power an omnidirectional antenna can
| possibly emit is somewhat less than 52 petawatts.
| Broadcast antennas output at most a few _mega_ watts EIRP
| because there's no utility in blasting out hundreds of
| megawatts for terrestrial transmission. Such broadcasts
| just aren't going to be detectable even with
| gravitational lensing from our Centauran neighbors.
|
| Nor are gravitational lenses terribly useful for beacons
| since you need the right geometry between the sender,
| star, and receiver to use the lens. You could use lensing
| to increase the EIRP of your transmission but only at a
| specific target. Nobody outside the focal plane of the
| lensing system is going to benefit from the lens.
|
| SGLs are a neat idea and an interesting topic but I don't
| think they solve many SETI problems.
| pklausler wrote:
| Over enough time and space, probabilities other than 0 and 1
| become rare; i.e., things that are not impossible become
| inevitable.
|
| Bracewell-von Neumann self-replicating interstellar probes are
| not impossible. I think we're not too far away from being able to
| create and launch them ourselves, if we survive.
|
| Has any technical civilization in galactic history launched a BvN
| probe? It only takes one launch of a BvN probe to saturate the
| galaxy for all time afterwards, esp. if they can mutate and
| compete. But we don't see any such probe activity, and I think
| that we would, if they were busily mining asteroids and
| frantically manufacturing copies of themselves. So I think we can
| tentatively assume that nobody has launched one yet in our
| galaxy; and explaining that possibility leads to some unsettling
| consequences.
| captainmuon wrote:
| I'm not convinced von Neuman probes are actually feasible. For
| one, you'd need general artificial intelligence because the
| task of setting up a production line on a different planet is
| incredibly complicated. Then you'd need to move a _lot_ of mass
| across star systems. Tiny replicators are not going to survive
| the harsh conditions on other planets, and then find and
| extract all the resources you need to build bigger machines. I
| 'm not sure what the minimum feasible probe would be, but I
| guess a lot bigger than everything we can send into space now.
|
| Finally, I'm not sure interstellar flight is realistically
| possible. Especially if you are not sending solar sails or rice
| corn sized probes, but a payload the size of an oil rig or
| bigger.
| pklausler wrote:
| I don't think that planets are good targets; you'd want to
| use asteroids for raw materials and stay in microgravity, no?
|
| But yes, if BvN probes are impossible at any level of
| technology, that would explain their apparent absence.
| shadowlight wrote:
| Fermis paradox is garbage.
|
| He can't make such a statement about probability when the
| circumstances aren't even known.
|
| We don't even know how life forms so how can we even know what
| the probability of it forming is?
|
| How do we know that probability is high enough that it is very
| likely to occur? The chances of it occurring could be incredibly
| low.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| For those that believe that intelligent life should be more
| common within the Milky Way, some author had a good response to
| that:
|
| It only takes one xenophobic von-Nuemann capable civilization to
| ruin the party for everyone.
| overthemoon wrote:
| Call me naive, but the fact that we're still sending messages
| makes me happy in spite of the grim calculations.
| jlpom wrote:
| Maybe I lack imagination, but I can only see as a constant
| selective pressure leading to a specie with interstellar space
| plans (we still haven't) the biped-on land evolution that took
| place on earth, and I can only see earth-like planet hosting
| avanced life.
| elihu wrote:
| Something to consider about "Dark Forest" scenarios is that
| there's no particular reason to think that a given species would
| be more benevolent towards its own kind than some other alien
| species.
|
| If you think about how humans behave, I think if we ever get to
| the point where we're a multi-planetary species, those two
| planets aren't going to trust each other very much. If we expand
| to other star systems with years of communication lag, it'll be
| even worse -- both societies are going to be constantly expecting
| a hail of nukes to fall out of the sky one of these days, unless
| there's either a plausible defense against such an attack, or a
| reasonable expectation of mutually-assured destruction.
| cletus wrote:
| Anyone interested in this topic should spend some time on Isaac
| Arthur's series about the Fermi Paradox. There's an episode on
| this called Hidden Aliens [1]. It's a flawed idea.
|
| If you assume that we live in an FTL universe subject to the laws
| of thermodynamics (as I do), mass and energy (being basically the
| same thing as we know) are the ultimate limiting factor. This
| basically means bigger is better. Remember such a civilization is
| likely thinking on time lines where a trillion years is a blink
| of an eye.
|
| So how will a spacefaring civilization evolve? Likely into a
| Dyson swarm for three primary reasons:
|
| 1. It requires no new physics. It's essentially an engineering
| problem that only requires materials as complex as stainless
| steel and energy tech no more complex than solar power. If you
| get better tech (eg fusion, graphene for construction) this
| outcome becomes more likely not less;
|
| 2. Orbitals are a highly efficient way of creating living area. A
| full Dyson swarm around our Sun would likely consume <1% of the
| mass of Mercury, for example; and
|
| 3. The energy output of the Sun is essentially "free".
|
| A full Dyson swarm makes you a Kardashev-2 (K2) civilization. On
| the Carl Sagan scale, that means you're consuming ~10^26 Watts of
| power. And that's just for one Sun. Now consider:
|
| 1. Such a civilization is capable of sterilizing the galaxy in
| 100,000 years if they choose to;
|
| 2. There's really no hiding from such a civilization;
|
| 3. There's really no hiding a Dyson swarm from a Dyson swarm from
| an advanced civilization due to the IR signature it would
| produce. This has nothing to do with say radio communications.
|
| Remember with the Fermi Paradox you don't have to establish what
| the average civilization does. Say there are 5 spacefaring
| civilizations in the Milky Way. What are the odds that all of
| them hide? Now imagine there are 100. The odds of them all hiding
| are much lower. And it only really takes one who decides to build
| Dyson Swarms and expand beyond their star to be detectable.
|
| So I can imagine a splinter of a civilization decides to "hide".
| A good example of this would be if fusion becomes viable. One
| could sink habitats into Neptune, which is not particularly
| dense, and probably live there undisturbed and unfound for eons
| is quite high. That's probably more hidden than, say, trying to
| hide between stars.
|
| It's just not likely that as the number of civilizations
| increases that all of them go that route.
|
| My view is that spacefaring life is just quite rare. We may well
| be the only one within out light cone within the Milky Way. Why
| that is is an interesting topic.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEBn8bc0k-I
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Although I very much enjoy the novel, I think Vlad's theory is
| more likely to be true:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9kbcGfX35M&ab_channel=Peter...
|
| As of myself, I also have a theory why it's difficult for
| civilizations to see each other:
|
| 1 - You need very advanced technology to break through the
| barrier of speed of light (worm hole, someone?)
|
| 2 - Such advanced technology will need a long, continuous period
| of peace and prosperity for researchers to figure it out. Wars
| are "useful" in certain way but not always.
|
| 3 - Intelligent beings are in general greedy (regardless of their
| biological construction) and they want to take as much resources
| as possible.
|
| 4 - The resources in the universe is unlimited, but the resources
| that one civilization can obtain is very limited.
|
| 5 - Combine 3 & 4, you can probably figure out that the "long,
| continuous period of peace and prosperity" is very much unlikely
| and very likely to be broken by wars within the civilizations.
|
| 6 - The more advanced the civilizations they are, more likely
| those wars will wipe them out completely.
|
| 7 - Even if they managed to avoid those destructive wars
| (unlikely already). Another factor we need to consider is the
| number of smart scientists and technicians that can figure out
| and implement those fancy technologies.
|
| 8 - Yeah for sure, one man, such as Newton or Einstein can leap
| forward our understanding of the universe.
|
| 9 - But you need a very large of population to "grow" one Newton
| or Einstein.
|
| 10 - Go back to 3 & 4, now tell me, even if they manage to avoid
| wars, can they also avoid creating a caste and shut everyone else
| out of a prosperous life? I mean look at ourselves.
|
| 11 - If such thing happens (eventually), there is not going to be
| enough population to create a Newton or Einstein. And
| science/tech eventually just don't go forward.
|
| 12 - Combine 6 & 11, it is really very, very unlikely for any
| civilization to develop advanced technology to travel beyond the
| speed of light, which also means we don't get to see them (very
| often).
| tener wrote:
| The Dark Forest makes so many (explicit and implicit) assumptions
| it starts to feel extremely dodgy. There are also falacious
| arguments embedded within it which fail to imagine numerous
| possible scenarios simply by following "tried and true" paths
| copy-pasted from sci-fi novels.
|
| TLDR: The forest analogy fails because civilizations are not
| singular entities (like animals are) but rather complex
| structures which can merge and evolve. The supposed technological
| and societal barriers can very well not materialize in which case
| the theory falls apart.
|
| Details below...
|
| > Suppose a vast number of civilizations distributed throughout
| the universe, on the order of the number of observable stars.
| Lots and lots of them.
|
| "On the order of observable stars" is extremely wide. Perhaps
| there is one life-bearing planet per galaxy. Perhaps there is one
| per 100 stars. Those are vastly different outcomes.
|
| > Survival is the primary need of civilizations.
|
| On individual level humans have no hope to "survive" (i.e. live
| immortal lives). Yet despite that fact we don't commit mass
| suicide. The "primary need" of human civilization to survive is
| merely emergent behaviour due to other factors. Perhaps advanced
| civilizations would be happy to achieve some grand undertaking
| and then perish.
|
| Now for the second "axiom":
|
| > Civilizations continuously grow and expand ...
|
| Expansionist civilizations with unlimited space certainly can do
| that. But does it really bring any benefits? The more complex the
| societal structure, the harder it is to change. Perhaps there is
| a critical mass above which it becomes detrimental to multiply
| beyond and all "sane" civilizations will stay below it.
|
| > ... , but the total matter in the universe remains constant.
|
| It may be finite, but perhaps most of it will be "stranded"
| anyway - so far away that access to it becomes non-feasible
| anyway.
|
| > ... In other words, the finite nature of resources will
| ultimately pit one civilization against another as they all
| struggle to sustain their growth.
|
| This part I believe is the biggest logical fallacy of all. What
| is civilization if not a set of societal structures? And we can
| easily imagine merging of two such structures - they are already
| composed of other structures; what is just another level of
| complexity? If we merge two "competing" civilizations suddenly we
| have a single larger civilization... supposedly without conflict?
| The amount of resources is the same as before but not we only
| have a single contender: the merged civilization.
|
| This paradox stems from the failure to account for the internal
| race for resources inherent to all civilizations. The
| civilizations are not unitary entities. Treating them as such and
| assuming blind dedication to it from its members is short sighted
| and lacking imagination.
|
| > If open communication exists, then conflict could be averted
| and tensions diffused. But given the time-lag involved with any
| attempt at interstellar communications, civilizations that are
| light-years apart are unlikely to resolve their fears quickly.
|
| Sufficiently advanced civs can simply send AI envoys or do mind
| upload of their representatives with the speed of light. This
| makes the learning of language, communication etc. very quick.
| Perhaps FTL communication can exist too. Etc. etc. Endless ways
| to break another assumption.
|
| > By the time they arrived, the attacker's technology would not
| have matured one bit, while the defender would have decades or
| centuries to progress.
|
| It may be possible that advanced technology does not progress as
| fast as it does now. See our experiments with fusion and particle
| accelerators. What used to be easy now takes years and billions
| in funding. Perhaps going at some point getting any kind of
| advancement will be nearly impossible and all technology will
| become "old". In this scenario the centuries of technological
| advancement are moot. OTOH potential gains from trade from
| foreign civs is very real possibility.
| yreg wrote:
| I agree with your other critisising points but I think
| presumptions (2) and (3) make sense somewhat.
|
| It's safe to assume that for any self-replicating life
| evolution takes place, universally. The genes (no matter on
| their biological implementation) are always evaluated by one
| fitness function only - whether they succeed in spreading
| around.
|
| Life isn't optimised for surviving per se, but it is optimised
| for replicating.
|
| The same in a way applies for civilisations. The ones that are
| bad at expanding are massively outexpanded/outnumbered by the
| ones that are good at expanding. Unless expanding fundamentally
| always leads to civilisation's downfall (but I don't see how it
| would?)
| dfilppi wrote:
| I suspect that any advanced species would abandon life as
| soon as possible. E.g. become non-biological and immortal.
| Then interstellar travel is trivial.
| yreg wrote:
| That makes sense, but machines and culture(s) still undergo
| evolution, unless replication and changes (mutations) are
| prevented. (Again, the ones that are good at spreading are
| more prevalent.) What do you think?
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| >Expansionist civilizations with unlimited space certainly can
| do that. But does it really bring any benefits? The more
| complex the societal structure, the harder it is to change.
| Perhaps there is a critical mass above which it becomes
| detrimental to multiply beyond and all "sane" civilizations
| will stay below it.
|
| If even one civilization were expansionist in the history of
| our galaxy, we would expect the whole place to be full of their
| descendants. Evolution works that way.
| godshatter wrote:
| I wonder if we're making too many assumptions about how
| civilizations would live and spread. I've always wondered why our
| species puts so much focus on planetary colonization instead of
| building smaller habitats. We seem to assume we'll terraform
| Mars, maybe build habitats on some of the Jovian moons, then jump
| to the next star. It seems more logical to me to take the ISS and
| iterate on it, building larger habitats and learning how to live
| in them.
|
| There could be trillions of habitats out there and we'd never
| know it. From small low-orbit stations orbiting home planets to
| larger complexes orbiting their stars instead up to generation
| ships moving to the next star to mine for more resources or to
| build more ships due to population limits being hit. Once you've
| perfected the building of habitats that are large enough and are
| tailored to your species specific needs, why mess around with
| planets that can kill you in so many different ways?
|
| Maybe the reason we don't see anyone is because we can't resolve
| even very large habitats at light-year distances and the reason
| we don't run into them is because we don't have anything they
| can't get somewhere that isn't already inhabited. Perhaps they
| avoid inhabited systems because of the dangers involved.
| Coriolis3 wrote:
| I agree, for an advanced species space habitats seem far
| superior to planets. A constant supply of free energy (solar),
| easy access to endless metal (asteroids), no
| earthquakes/tsunamis/volcanos/wildfires. If we're talking far-
| future, to me the Culture and their Orbitals represent the
| ideal utopian endpoint for humanity.
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| In the near future it is more likely we will wipe out ourselves
| either due to Nuclear War, Global Warming, rogue AI or similar,
| than some hostile alien civilization will get us. It seems that
| we are those hostile aliens for ourselves.
| [deleted]
| myrmidon wrote:
| Do you think there is a "real" (>1% over the next century) risk
| for humanity to wipe itself out, or just that the hostile-alien
| risk is way beyond negligible in comparison?
|
| Because all current climate doom-erism notwithstanding--
| humanity extinction seems impossible to achieve to me via
| climate change or nuclear war; rogue autonomous self-
| replicating systems might be a danger, but are too far beyound
| current tech to estimate risk IMO...
|
| Very curious if/how/why you disagree on this!
| hnbad wrote:
| We don't need to go extinct. Our global economy is very
| fragile, relatively speaking and it's not at all clear we
| could sustain the economy necessary to perform space
| exploration if bad things happen.
|
| To avoid an extended argument about all the ways in which
| climate change will screw things up, let's focus on nuclear
| war: a nuclear war between, say, India and China would not
| only wipe out huge swaths of the human population but also
| ruin the global economy because industries in Europe and the
| US depend on these countries. And that's without going into
| the ecological effects of a nuclear war.
|
| The economy relies on layers and layers of extremely
| convoluted supply chains and can't sustain a loss of even 1%
| of the human population, let alone 10% or more. The US has
| only seen a death of around 0.2% of its population due to
| COVID and is already facing labor shortages in retail. The
| blockade of the Suez canal was a big concern but imagine the
| Suez canal is simply gone.
| pharke wrote:
| Those convoluted supply chains are a recent phenomena. Some
| international trade is necessary but large countries like
| the United States are capable of producing almost
| everything they require domestically. Trade is only
| preferable if you can import something for less money than
| you can manufacture it locally.
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| > The economy relies on layers and layers of extremely
| convoluted supply chains and can't sustain a loss of even
| 1% of the human population
|
| I think you are underestimating the ability of humanity to
| adjust and innovate, especially over time. I mean we
| literally essentially lose 1% of the human population to
| old age every year.
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| Just a feeling or rather educated guess is:
|
| That general AI going rogue if it gets conscious is small,
| more probable is narrow AI that has mistake in setting goals,
| given too much power by either military or corporations.
|
| _Global Warming_ is highly probable but we still have chance
| if we find energy to cooperate around mutual goal. Key
| points:
|
| - Siberian permafrost and releasing huge amount of CH4
| topping up all efforts.
|
| - Amazon forest now release more CO2 than sequester (this
| week news)
|
| - Species are being extinct on a rapid rate
|
| - Wildfires/droughts continue to increase devastation
|
| - Floods and heatwaves are stronger (losing ice caps will
| increase this to Equatorial heats once planet albedo of caps
| is lost )
|
| Now, critical is next 10 years That does not mean that
| humanity will be wipe out in 10 years, but will set course
| for final destination. As no technology or amount of money
| will help us past that point, weather pastern and issues will
| be out of our hands. In bad scenario 99% reduction of
| population till 2100. Again guess. Underground pocket of
| sparse scientific communities could survive bit longer past
| this point, using geothermal energy and nuclear power.
|
| _Nuclear war_ is quite probable, I think critical is next 20
| years: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41421/pentagon-
| warns-o... If all weapons are fired, simply put, some people
| may survive, but they would wish they are dead. Let me put
| this way, we all have romantic dreams of surviving, go to
| Hiroshima, ground zero, then straight to museum, and then
| imagine something 2000 times more powerful multiplied by
| 16000. And of course everyone forgets Nuclear power plants,
| ~450 with similar yield. If you do not have Cheyenne Mountain
| complex at your disposal, your life expectancy is between 0
| and 3 years. (acid rains, nuclear winter, no food, no
| medications, no drinking water, no animals ...). Even if
| someone survives it would be back to stone age - killing each
| other for basic necessities (even human meat), as there is
| nothing else to eat.
|
| China vs US, US vs Russia, India vs Pakistan, rogues nation
| getting a weapon on some black market ...
|
| Anyhow, if our civilization was cooperative society with
| higher goals, it would be fine, but from my experience, and
| from what I saw during my life, all governments are nothing
| but aristocratic mafia organisation sponsored by big business
| having one goal to increase wealth of their share holders
| justifying all means by what ever ends they have.
|
| But regardless what I wrote or how many arguments I give as
| Friedrich Nietzsche "Hope in reality is the worst of all
| evils because it prolongs the torments of man." many
| especially those in power to do something, will have tendency
| not to believe in the final outcome until it happens, so
| instead of taking actions they will continue business as
| usual.
|
| When I was young I lived in different country there one post
| WW2 leader used to say "Work and enjoy like we will live in
| peace 100 of years, and at the same time prepare like there
| will be a war tomorrow", personally I think it is a good
| policy for Global Warming or WW3, we should imagine the worst
| and then work as hard as possible so it never happens,
| employing all possible strategies at our disposal to save all
| life on planet, (DNA bank, 5d crystals, space travel, multi-
| planet, multi-suns ... whatever).
|
| Similar like in IT we protect systems, for me who ever uses
| "doom-erisam" and similar shaming terms is nothing better
| than those person. Ostrich burying head in the sand like will
| not save you from the lion. In IT good network security guys
| imagine all possible scenarios, and they are not afraid that
| by the so called "new-age quantum vibration field" if they
| imagine bad scenarios they will attract it just by the power
| of thought. Admins/devs frequently must imagine and test all
| bad scenarios, even play roles of bad actors, so they can
| employ protective techniques.
|
| In the similar way we should explore bad scenarios and see is
| it possible to do anything, but unfortunately, we who talk
| about it and comment a lot, our circle of concern is
| significantly bigger then our influence, and those who have
| huge circle of influence (money) the do not give two dimes
| about our concerns, and that is the reason my friend I am not
| optimist about our future in next 10 years...
| myrmidon wrote:
| > "doom-erisam" and similar shaming terms is nothing better
| than those person
|
| First: I use the term because I see NO factual basis for
| assuming that humankind is going extinct. Your post did not
| change my view on that:
|
| 1) I fully agree that global warming is a massive problem.
|
| But assuming that it's going to lead to human extinction is
| IMO straight up _delusional_.
|
| The only plausible mechanism is full-runaway "hot-venus"
| greenhouse effect (evaporating our oceans), and that is a
| scenario that--pretty much all scientists agree--we are NOT
| going to reach no matter how much fossil fuel we burn (http
| s://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect#Eart...
| ).
|
| Rising sea levels and climate change might lead to
| international crises and cost countless human lifes, but
| there is simply NO WAY for this to kill ALL humans by
| itself.
|
| 2) With nuclear threats it's a similar situation: There are
| simply not enough nukes to cover the inhabited surface
| (even assuming worst-case full escalation!):
|
| The highest estimates I found were between 1.6 and 3
| billion victims, assuming that every last nuke was used on
| the most effective target and killing every person there
| (which are both completely unrealistic assumptions).
|
| Both fallout and nuclear winter are completely insufficient
| for extinction purposes, because there is not enough
| radioactive material for the fallout and not enough dust in
| the atmosphere for nuclear winter to kill all (we had
| somewhat comparable volcanic events in the past).
|
| 3) Corrupt leadership is something humankind has survived
| with since leaders exist; there is simply no reason to
| assume that they are suddenly going to cause our all
| extinction.
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| > I use the term because I see NO factual basis for
| assuming that humankind is going extinct. Your post did
| not change my view on that:
|
| There is a huge difference between I do NOT want to see,
| and there is NO factual basis.
|
| From https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities only
| 1170 cities have population of 2,179,929,822, RS-28
| Sarmat yield is 10 heavy warheads, each yield of 1.5Mt.
| Currently there is 3,700 nukes deployed and 13,132 nukes
| total. We do not know what China has so those number are
| without it. With the new hyper-sonic weapons time to
| react and go to shelter which in London practically does
| not exist except underground transport, so to get to
| nearest station you would need 30 min but nuke needs 15
| min to arrive. Let's suppose that one Sarmat is enough to
| level town size of London or Paris. So only with firstly
| deployed there would be 2200 nukes to spare. But what
| about heavier nukes those 10Mt yields, what about
| revamping Tsar Bomba with 50Mt (8km fireball, 68 km
| mushroom cloud and shock waves circling Earth 3 times).
| So, what exactly will intercept hyper-sonic? So when you
| say estimate 1.6 to 3bn I would rather say it is very
| optimistic, and that only from the blasts. Next goes
| fallout... are you saying no one will die out cancer in
| full exchange? It will be all ok after 5 years? EMP would
| wiped out grid and internet, what will exactly pump
| water? What are you going to drink? Quickly made filter
| from charcoal and that will do? And to what hospital are
| you going to go if you scratch on rusty nail for
| instance? Next, what are you going to eat, 80% of food in
| UK is imported, https://www.businessinsider.com/no-deal-
| brexit-percentage-br... there is no more ships with food
| and oil? Where are you going to get money banks are out,
| no plastic cards, cash does not worth anything? do you
| have silver or gold? How many will die out of hunger in
| next 10 years?
|
| And what about nuclear power plants 450 of them? They are
| not the same like nukes, nukes burn their fission
| material, but as we know from Fukushima Daiichi Accident
| and Chernobyl disaster, they were quite tricky, and there
| we managed to do something about it. Who will go to "fix"
| nuclear power planets after exchange, so plenty of
| fallout there?
|
| As I said it would not be extinction but 99% reduction,
| and those who survive would wish they have not. By the
| way I am not trying to convince anyone people have had
| too many video survival games with happy ending, and to
| test reality you just need to go to near by woods for 7
| days without food and water, and what ever experience you
| have just multiply by 300 times.
|
| Going back to first line,
|
| > your post did not change my view
|
| I somehow find more frighting and delusional that way of
| thinking, as it leaves possibility to use mentioned as
| solution for fixing problem as people optimistically
| believe they are the one that will survive.
|
| There is a reason why "Mutually assured destruction" and
| "nuclear deterrence" exist as such, as no one will ever
| attempt any such idiotic thing. As what we model usually
| does not correspond with reality. And when you know that
| everyone will loose like in the move "War games" then
| only way to win is not to play a game. And if current
| narrow AI can do it today I hope you as far superior
| intelligence can come to the same conclusion.
| myrmidon wrote:
| > I somehow find more frighting and delusional that way
| of thinking, as it leaves possibility to use mentioned as
| solution for fixing problem as people optimistically
| believe they are the one that will survive.
|
| I'll give you the other perspective on the doom-erism:
|
| People preaching about the inevitable extinction of
| humankind just provide ammunition/"strawmans" _against_
| progressive climate policies because these doom-
| prophecies are obvious bullshit and everyone not in an
| echo bubble knows it.
|
| Just consider how easy it was to dismiss your "humankind
| is going extinct because of climate change" points--
| because it IS BULLSHIT. Climate change is NOT going to
| lead to human extinction, and preaching this just steals
| credibility and hinders much more than it helps by
| polarizing society/preventing consensus.
|
| As for the nuclear threat:
|
| > only 1170 cities have population of 2,179,929,822
|
| First: These are metropolitan areas, not cities. One
| warhead per area is not even going to kill a fraction of
| the people.
|
| Consider: Tokyo metro region is 14000 km^2. Fireball size
| for a 10Mt warhead is <20km^2 (no larger warheads are in
| use and there would be no point). The highest estimate I
| found (3E9 victims) assumed 3 warheads per region I
| think, which is pretty similar to the numbers you came up
| with.
|
| Taking all the aftereffects into account, you'll maybe
| get past the 50% population mark, but that is still not
| human extinction.
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| > Just consider how easy it was to dismiss your
| "humankind is going extinct because of climate change"
| points-
|
| You have to understand that you have not dismissed
| anything, you do not have knowledge you have beliefs,
| judging by the angry typing. There is no point discussing
| with believes.
|
| Regarding full fledged nuclear exchange I would ask you
| to write a paper and make computer model, I do not know
| what is your field of work do you have a sufficient
| knowledge to do it?
|
| Regarding Global Warming it is fairly uncharted
| territory, now we know that models from 10 years ago were
| overly optimistic and that things are happening at much
| faster rate than expected.
|
| Anyhow, to cut the long unfruitful story short, lets
| remember this and check in 5 and 10 years what happens.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| If civilization as we know it ends but humanity survives it
| would be very difficult for future generations to reestablish
| because we've used up all the easy to access hydrocarbons.
| Without easy to reach coal there won't be another industrial
| revolution and humanity would be stuck for millions of years
| until the hydrocarbons reform.
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| That is some kind of Oil centric thinking that got us in
| this mess in the first place. Renewables and fusion can do
| the much better better job at any point. By the way coal
| will not form ever again, only reason why coal/oil formed
| is because bacteria has not learned how to decompose
| cellulose at the time.
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/the-
| fanta...
| pharke wrote:
| I believe that theory is no longer valid. It was
| supposedly fungus that feeds on woody plants that
| resulted in a drop in lignin rich coal but that doesn't
| seem to quite work out. Coal is formed when there's a lot
| of organic matter that gets trapped in an oxygen poor
| environment and then buried and compressed over time.
| That process is certainly still happening though not at
| the same rate it has in the past. This article has some
| good details https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/why-
| was-most-of-the-...
|
| There's still quite a lot of coal though.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I don't think renewables and fusion will be an option in
| a post apocalyptic society. After a few generations of
| anarchy the knowledge will be lost.
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| True, solar and nuclear need a bit more tech, but wind
| and hydro are quite simple they need a bit of wire,
| magnet and something to spin.
| myrmidon wrote:
| I disagree on this, because biofuels are a viable
| substitute in almost every situation.
|
| I'm fairly certain that our accumulated knowledge would
| make a second industrial happen even faster _in spite of_
| fossil-fuel-lack (but it might play out slightly
| differently, because of higher fuel costs...)
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Doubtful that there's enough biofuels to produce high
| quality steel in large quantities and that's a pre-
| requisite to a post-apocalyptic neo-Industrial
| Revolution. Only coal burns hot enough and was available
| the huge quantities necessary.
| myrmidon wrote:
| Sure, producing iron without coal sucks; but there is
| already enough scrap metal around to power several
| additional industrial revolutions, and an arc furnace is
| really simple, especially if already know how electricity
| works beforehand.
|
| Long term, there are alternative routes that could be
| taken (capable of processing fresh ore) but using scrap
| metal just seems easier/more likely to me.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| The universe could still be a dark forest of AIs ready to smash
| each other as soon as they spot each other.
| yreg wrote:
| Do you think that most/all civilisations end this way before
| becoming spacefarers?
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| I don't think, or rather I hope there are civilization that
| as a part of their evolution had cooperation, sharing,
| exploration and innovation embedded as main and prevalent
| strategies of survival and thriving. I would like to think
| that there is as in magic fairy tails of old, civilization
| where good prevails. Where leaders (or what ever mechanism of
| decision they have) and those in power - are not easily
| corrupted as here.
| hnbad wrote:
| You're describing humans. Up to the point where you hope
| their leaders aren't corruptible. The problem with humans
| mostly comes down to centralization. We're an extremely
| cooperative species until we're put in an environment that
| promotes competition and punishes cooperation.
| Centralization of power is one such environment. And it's
| very hard to undo at this point.
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs Corruption is
| not just leaders it is a network of beneficiaries, like a
| snake with thousand heads, and regardless how many you
| cut new will grow. And we do not know how to get out of
| that mold. And democracy in uneducated society simply
| does not work. And we do not have it. All governments are
| aristocracies. News media displays of "busting"
| corruption is just "bread in circuses" of this age, media
| manipulations of wide populous while business as usual
| continues, hypnosis of population by spin offs and
| demagogues narrative.
| chadwittman wrote:
| It's a common proposed solution to the Great Filter idea.
| jmull wrote:
| I love that series -- just an incredible, imaginative, unique
| perspective -- but the dark forest hypothesis just doesn't make
| sense.
|
| It's orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude less energy to
| communicate with (including obscuring your origin, if you want)
| than destroy a civilization. And communication has potential
| benefits (cooperation) that destruction does not.
|
| Civilizations that communicated would very quickly and easily
| out-compete/out-advance civilizations that did not. "Malevolent"
| civilizations would inevitably run into more advanced cooperating
| civs sooner or later and be checked, either learning to cooperate
| themselves or lose.
|
| Put another way, the assumptions used to build out the
| hypothesis, "Chains of Suspicion" and "Technological Explosion",
| don't make sense either. "Chains of Suspicion" assumes
| civilizations _cannot_ communicate, yet the dark forest
| hypothesis assume civilizations can destroy each other. That 's a
| contradiction. If you can physically interact, you can
| communicate (and as I pointed out before, with much, much less
| energy/resources than it takes to destroy). And "Technological
| Explosion", as written in the book, assume exponential
| technological growth could occur at any point, which seems to be
| nonsense to me. Any kind of exponential growth necessarily
| depends on a medium primed with the resources for that growth and
| stops when the resources are expended (which is never all that
| long, given the nature of exponential growth).
|
| I cringed every time this idea was forced into the forefront of
| the books. They are such great and imaginative books, I don't
| mind at all that not all the ideas really pan out, but it was a
| little hard to stomach every time the plot turned on this weak
| idea.
| luckyandroid wrote:
| > "Chains of Suspicion" assumes civilizations cannot
| communicate, yet the dark forest hypothesis assume
| civilizations can destroy each other > If you can physically
| interact, you can communicate
|
| I think you misunderstood what they meant by "communicate".
| They don't mean "reach with a message", they mean "engage in
| back and forth communication with both sides understanding the
| conversation".
|
| We're still struggling to talk to dolphins, but technically we
| could nuke them all to death if we ever got scared they were
| rising up.
| xwolfi wrote:
| But we're not struggling to talk to dolphins, they're
| struggling to materialize Shakespeare. We understand their
| structures and concerns more than they understand ours, and
| we observe them when they're still in the original soup.
|
| ALl this to say: if they were rising up, we'd probably be
| able to create a bidirectional connection. We can only make
| sense "nuking them all to death", like you say in america to
| mean "defend our freedom and way of life", if we are able to
| communicate and are faced with a refusal to submit. The
| dolphin, so far, accept american hegemony - there's no
| purpose to nuking them.
|
| So it is correct what you say, but here we're talking of
| civilizations. Civilizations worth nuking will always have a
| way to understand each others, otherwise there'd be no threat
| worth suppressing.
| artimaeis wrote:
| I also adore the series. It's become my favorite sci-fi I've
| read in years.
|
| You're leaving out the time required to communicate. Yes,
| communication would require less energy, but time is a constant
| that even type 3 civilizations could be in short supply of.
|
| The chain of suspicion calls this out explicitly, it's not that
| the civs cannot communicate, it's that due to the extreme
| lengths of time required for back-and-forth communications
| their societies are likely to significantly change during
| communications, leading to higher probability of the
| technological explosion.
|
| What medium was primed for the technological explosion on Earth
| since the industrial revolution? I mean, I reckon we could
| point to an array of things that have seemed as though they
| would be a limit, but thus-far we've always found ways past
| that (see: peak oil). I'm not trying to indicate I think our
| trends _will_ go on forever, just that it seems possible they
| could.
| obedm wrote:
| I think dark forest is the best explanation so far.
|
| If what you say is true, it should've been true for earlier
| human civilizations too.
|
| Why didn't the Chinese and Japanese civilizations unite to
| conquer others?
|
| Why didn't the Mongols unite with whoever else to conquer,
| instead of Genghis Khan doing it all with a bunch of Mongols in
| horses?
|
| Human civilization is a dark forest that only changed with
| global trade. The communication challenge is language and
| culture. And civilizations have always been technologically
| distinct, with the more powerful one almost always conquering.
|
| With interstellar communication and technological advance it
| would be orders of magnitude higher stakes.
| pharke wrote:
| Each of those civilizations you mentioned rose to the heights
| of their power by uniting multiple smaller tribes into one
| larger civilization.
| obedm wrote:
| You've got a fantastic point. It reminds me of Chinese
| history, full of war between clans until it was finally
| United.
|
| What I keep thinking about is that we are all... Humans.
| Like, the same animal, same way of thinking etc. And yet
| our answer so many times is conflict.
|
| The only reason conquerors didn't kill all the conquered
| was for taxes and slaves and so on. Imagine if resources
| were not an issue ( advanced enough tech) and you wanted to
| avoid confrontation.
|
| Sending a near light speed bullet to explode a star seems a
| good trade-off to keep your dominance.
| aeternum wrote:
| Historically it's extremely rare that the conquerors killed
| everyone in the cities they conquered. Instead they enslaved
| some, or let them mostly live and just taxed them. Even with
| other species that regularly attack humans (tigers or even
| mosquitos), we have not exterminated them.
| obedm wrote:
| We're trying our best to exterminate certain species of
| mosquitoes. We haven't done it because we lack the
| technical ability as of yet.
|
| Also, have you met any Aztec? There are barely any American
| Indians left compared to the millions there were
| originally.
|
| Mammuts? All the giant marsupials of Australia that went
| extinct the moment humans set foot there?
|
| We've been on top of the food chain for very long. Now
| imagine if we discover another race may take our place and
| the only option is communication or total obliteration?
|
| I wish it was different, we only have a sample size of one.
|
| But just like the three space ships that first found out
| about the dark forest and ultimately killed each other,
| it's what makes most sense from game theory
| Mary-Jane wrote:
| Not many neanderthals around these days. Just an
| observation.
| pharke wrote:
| We carry them with us in our genes, that seems to
| indicate more than just war was going on.
| obedm wrote:
| We don't know that happened to them, or to any other
| human species for that matter.
|
| But we're pretty sure we obliterated a entire species in
| our way up the food chain ( giant marsupials for example)
| [deleted]
| Florin_Andrei wrote:
| > _They are such great and imaginative books_
|
| Those books are pretty awful. They can't make up their mind
| whether they belong to sci-fi or fantasy. Sometimes they veer
| towards hard scifi but then make naive mistakes with current
| science. The characters are cardboard cutouts, very shallow,
| and make nonsensical decisions. The general atmosphere is
| depressing and ends in the complete failure of basically
| everything.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Even with a dark forest, one would have territorial threats
| announced to the rest of the world.
|
| Examples: Blow a star up and make it project a unique territorial
| mark. Make a diamond lighttower, beaming threatening messages to
| probable green zones, to lure unsuspecting enemies in.
| nestorD wrote:
| My favorite answer to Fermi's Paradox is a paper (which I do not
| have on hand) showing that it can be explained by the
| approximation error in doing a raw product of probabilities.
|
| If, instead of doing a product of the probability of each event,
| you actually take the various distributions into account
| (nowadays you can easily test a wide variety of distributions
| with monte carlo methods) then, the probability of getting into
| contact with another life in the universe becomes vanishingly
| small.
| [deleted]
| pdimitar wrote:
| What would that be a "favorite" answer? It's just one of the
| hypotheses. Drake's equation and how exactly must it be applied
| has been fiercely discussed for decades.
|
| Unless, of course, saying it's your "favorite" is your way of
| saying "I like to believe in this one hypothesis".
| nestorD wrote:
| It removes the paradox without requiring additional
| hypotheses, just refining the math. That makes it the most
| convincing solution to the paradox for me.
| jeremysalwen wrote:
| My interpretation of that paper is that it is saying "We don't
| have hard enough bounds on the parameters of the Drake
| Equation, so one (or more) of the parameters could be much
| lower than expected". But without specifying which parameters
| are much lower than expected, the paper is just saying "our
| current understanding/uncertainty about the universe is
| consistent with someone solving the drake equation in some
| unknown way at a later point in the future". Which I don't
| think is actually a solution. The real question we are
| interested in is _which_ parameters are lower than expected and
| _why_.
| taejo wrote:
| I guess this is the paper you're talking about:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.02404
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Peter F. Hamilton's Salvation series [1] has a similar take, but
| also provides a possible out: don't live on planets or near
| stars. In Liu Cixin's books (which I _loved_ btw, also SPOILERS),
| the level of technology involves weapons that can destroy solar
| systems. It seems reasonable that such civilizations could live
| between the stars.
|
| I don't agree that Civilizations need to expand without limit.
| Even humans, having reached a certain level of comfort, have
| _difficulty_ reproducing enough to maintain population levels.
| Conceivably then, civilizations will reach a comfortable size and
| then stop. Certainly they might be willing to stop when they
| reach a "boundary".
|
| The problems with enemies is that, unless we are of sufficient
| size, we might bump into an enemy that is, say, twice our size,
| and therefore can thump us in a war. However, novels by Iain M.
| Banks [2] and Neal Asher [3] provide insight here (Culture vs
| Iridans, Polity vs Prador). The issue is not how many weapons you
| have (W), or even how many weapons you can make (dW/dt), but how
| fast you can make weapons factories (d2w/dt2) (etc). And
| ultimately, organics simply have absolutely no chance against AI:
| in both Culture and Polity, the AI runs the war for humans.
|
| On the matter of technological breakout, the entire Lensman
| series has an underlying theme of the back-and-forth of new
| weapon vs it's mitigation [5]. Liu makes a good case that such
| back-and-forth is unrealistic: in the time it takes light to
| travel from the enemy's star to yours, they might go from poking
| each other with pointy sticks to fusion bombs, or from fusion
| bombs to star-killers. But there is a simple mitigation there
| too: don't hang around stars. Or rather, think of stars as Navies
| think of islands: nice place to refuel and R&R, but don't put all
| your ships in one harbor.
|
| Ultimately, if survival is the goal, then Salvation or We are Bob
| [4] are the way to go: expand as much as possible. Just be
| willing to defer to existing civilizations.
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34068552-salvation
|
| [2] https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5807106.Iain_M_Banks
|
| [3] https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/56353.Neal_Asher
|
| [4] https://www.amazon.com/Are-Legion-Bob-Bobiverse-Book-
| ebook/d...
|
| [5] https://www.goodreads.com/series/49225-lensman
| Archelaos wrote:
| What makes the dark forest hypothesis not so conving to me is
| that it has the presupposition that it is indeed possible to
| hide. An advanced civilization close to us that is surveying the
| sky for signs of life would have very likely identified earth as
| a very promissing candidate due to the presence of methane and
| oxygen in its atmosphere at the same time. So our star system
| would have long been under surveillance, before we had the chance
| to develop a technology that would reliable disguise our
| presence.
|
| If such a technology is possible at all, only the very first
| advanced civilization had the ability to hide from all others.
| And only if they were able to develop it before any other
| civilization had been able to track them.
|
| To some extent it might nevertheless be a reasonable strategy to
| keep as quiet as possible. But this strategy is less and less
| useful for the latecomers. If they were already tracked by a
| multitude of other advanced civilization they would hardly
| benefit from keeping quiet. Unless they (wrongly) think that they
| are an early advanced civilization.
|
| However, if a couple of these civilizations start to openly seek
| contact to others, what can the hidden ones do? If a hidden
| civilization starts to fight one of these latecomers, it would
| need to leave its cover and make itself known to all other
| civilizations in its vicinity. If it follows the dark forst
| hypothesis, it could only do so, when it is sure that it is the
| only dangerous civilization in its forest.
|
| This leaves me with the following alternatives:
|
| - The forest is dark, because there is only one civilization out
| there that is very capable in hiding and has the ability to
| exterminate any latecomer efficiently and without traces.
|
| - The forest appears dark, because it is thinly populated and we
| just have not looked enough for the others.
|
| - We are the only ones in our cosmic vicinity.
| jerf wrote:
| I agree with your logic but would add one more thing to it:
| There is no compelling reason to wait until a planet
| conclusively proves it has intelligence on it to nuke it into
| oblivion with a kinetic kill projectile. You don't really know
| how long it will take for an intelligent species that could
| compete with you to arise. Humans have moved pretty quickly on
| cosmological scales, there's no particular reason to believe
| we're moving at the max speed and a lot of reason to think
| otherwise. Compared to the amount of energy you can obtain over
| cosmological time periods, the expenditure of a kinetic kill
| projectile is nothing.
|
| In fact, if you don't mind waiting a bit, it can be almost
| trivial. All you have to do is basically get a factory to the
| target system; it can use local resources to build a kinetic
| kill projectile efficiently out of a big, local hunks of rock
| and local hydrogen. Launching near-light-speed projectiles from
| lightyears away is the emergency "oh crap! They're smart
| already!" option. Killing a planet that only has dinosaurs on
| it is _dead easy_ for these hypothetical intelligences and
| there 's little reason to believe they wouldn't.
|
| So I think the dark forest hypothesis falls down on the fact
| that not only has Earth been broadcasting loud and clear to the
| stars that it has life on it ever since the Great Oxygenation
| Catastrophe, which was somewhere around 2 to 2.5 _billion_
| years ago, the Dark Forest theory implies that any surrounding
| intelligence that arose and was capable of seeing Earth on that
| time frame should have hit it. That has not happened. And 2.5
| billion years is actually significant even on cosmological time
| scales.
|
| (Also, no, the dinosaur asteroid or other events were not kill
| projectiles. If an alien intelligence is going to kill-
| projectile Earth there's no compelling reason to just sort of
| inconvenience life... it's going to _eliminate_ it.
| Hypothesizing a race capable of launching projectiles but being
| too stupid to realize it wouldn 't do the job is too precise a
| level of incompetence to believe in. As they say, there's no
| kill like overkill.)
|
| Fun science fiction premise... not a solution to the Fermi
| paradox.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| How far away from earth is it still possible to detect oxygen
| and/or methane levels in the atmosphere?
| minitoar wrote:
| You just need enough light to do spectroscopy. I'm not
| really aware of a limit other than being in our light cone.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Light years with the right telescope. It's just
| spectroscopy.
| david-gpu wrote:
| If I was a technologically advanced civilization, I would
| send robotic Von Neumann probes around the galaxy to keep
| tabs on things at close proximity.
|
| If I was also murderous, I would have programmed the probes
| to destroy any signs of life.
|
| So, the fact that we are still alive after broadcasting the
| presence of life through out atmosphere for the last couple
| billion years is quite reassuring.
| pharke wrote:
| Wouldn't that be the most difficult and expensive way to
| simply monitor for life or technosignatures? Compare that
| to simply (relatively speaking) building massive space
| based optical and radio observatories that can observe
| every visible star. The light reaching you has already
| made the trip, you just have to collect it. If you were
| murderous, you could launch an attack from your home
| system rather than waiting for the probes to spread from
| system to system.
|
| Granted there could be some technical limitations that
| prevent you from observing certain systems but that pool
| will be much smaller than an entire galaxy of stars.
|
| Also, don't forget that a Von Neumann probe is at a
| disadvantage when it arrives in a system since you want
| to send the minimum number of probes to each star and
| then have them replicate on arrival. If your probe
| accidentally shows up in a system that contains an
| advanced civilization capable of detecting and capturing
| it then you've given away the fact of your existence and
| your intent along with all the information that can be
| gained by studying the probe.
| mLuby wrote:
| So have your replicators approach a system from an
| unexpected vector; one course correction in interstellar
| space should be enough.
|
| Also I'd expect the probes would communicate with the
| homeworld via relays (where they were replicated) rather
| than directly, so it'd take a fair amount of effort to
| unravel a replicator network unless you caught one of the
| very first probes.
|
| And also it'd be conspicuous if there was a volume of
| space in your network where your probes always failed.
| wait_a_minute wrote:
| I wonder if everyone is therefore incentivized to not
| send out such probes, then. Since no one can guarantee
| they are advanced enough that their probe won't get
| captured by someone more advanced who just sends back a
| scarier probe as a thank you gift.
| DonaldPShimoda wrote:
| (Major spoilers for The Expanse below.)
|
| > There is no compelling reason to wait until a planet
| conclusively proves it has intelligence on it to nuke it into
| oblivion with a kinetic kill projectile.
|
| Or send a technologically engineered molecule that can hijack
| single-cellular life to help establish your needed technology
| in the target solar system.
| tshaddox wrote:
| It's funny that that wouldn't have been a spoiler if you
| hadn't mentioned the name of the work.
| jerf wrote:
| That's a variant of what I discuss in another reply, but
| well underscores my point of just how _easy_ this is if you
| happen to get there anywhere in the 2.0-2.4 billion window
| Earth has had prior to intelligence. If you colonize the
| system in any manner, be it biological, technological,
| whatever, for Dark Forest purposes that 's equivalent to
| destruction; there is no longer a threat of natural
| competing life.
|
| You've got two major approaches: Fling a kinetic kill
| projectile, or if you have the tech to get "something" into
| the target system at roughly orbital velocities, send some
| machines to do the job with local resources.
|
| None of these things appear to have happened in Earth's
| past. Ironically, trying to spin yarns in which they did
| anyhow still end up countering the Dark Forest hypothesis,
| because all such attempts must either include significant
| probabilities of failure of the attempts or the possibility
| that the life out there is benevolent (to some degree, at
| least sufficient to avoid simply wiping us out, which on
| this scale is "benevolence" despite whatever else they may
| be doing) which itself would imply the forest isn't that
| dark.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| "Too precise a level of incompetence to believe in." That's
| the most beautiful wording I have read in some time...
| jerf wrote:
| Hat tip: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=615
| "That is a very specific level of tired."
| im3w1l wrote:
| If I use humanity as a model, then we don't see other great
| apes as dangerous competitors. Rather we see them as
| interesting curiosities. We want them to stay alive. But it's
| hard to resist the desire to turn their habitats into
| something economically productive.
|
| Colonizing other planets and making them into homes for
| aliens long before a native civilization has a chance to
| arise seems more plausible than just destroying them.
| jerf wrote:
| For the purposes of this conversation, colonizing other
| planets effectively _is_ destroying them. After that, no
| natural intelligent competitor will arise and surprise you,
| because you 're right there to keep an eye on everything.
|
| (Of course, you may still have any amount of conflict with
| your fellow settlers, or your someone in your original
| species' descendants two systems over, but that's a
| completely different conversation.)
| pharmakom wrote:
| You don't destroy the system because you want to inhabit it
| yourself. This assumes that life is looking for similar
| habitats and that it's not simpler to create an artificial
| planet anyway.
| crowbahr wrote:
| If there is oxygen breathing carbon based intelligent life
| that wants our planet they could've easily spotted and
| taken it anytime within the past 2 billion years.
|
| It seems safe to say that there isn't life that wants our
| planet.
| wait_a_minute wrote:
| Or they did want it and used it for seeding more complex
| life so they could eventually create homo sapiens. Like
| the start of the film Prometheus.
| crowbahr wrote:
| Which would mean that the dark forest is still false
| right?
| edgyquant wrote:
| Why would anyone come from light years away to inhabit a
| planet. It would be cheaper to just build habitats or
| colonize a planet in their solar system. There is almost
| nothing we can provide to a civilization capable of
| traversing between start systems.
| tjalfi wrote:
| > Why would anyone come from light years away to inhabit
| a planet.
|
| Many motives from the age of exploration could apply -
| imperialism, religious beliefs, religious or political
| differences, cultural exchange, scientific discovery,
| competition with others, etc. People don't always take
| the cheapest option; the same could be true of aliens.
| crowbahr wrote:
| All resources are scarce.
|
| But if nobody wants our world and they're scared of
| intelligent life then just send out Von Neumann probes to
| ensure intelligence isn't showing up elsewhere. First
| mover's advantage nullifies the entire dark forest.
| edgyquant wrote:
| _relatively_ scarce, sure. There are millions of times
| more of all the resources Earth has between us and any
| civilization coming from light years away. By the time
| they needed Earths resources they'd have to have gobbled
| up large chunks of, if not the whole, Galaxy.
| crowbahr wrote:
| Right but the whole premise of the Fermi Paradox is that
| it doesn't take long (on a galactic scale) to gobble up
| the entire galaxy using STL transit if you're dealing
| with a constantly growing civilization.
|
| So either they'd - already have gotten here & already
| have destroyed the earth when we showed intelligence OR -
| already have gotten here & don't care about destroying
| intelligence.
| krapp wrote:
| >So either they'd - already have gotten here & already
| have destroyed the earth when we showed intelligence OR -
| already have gotten here & don't care about destroying
| intelligence.
|
| Or... civilizations don't experience unbounded growth
| over millions of years across millions of light years to
| begin with.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Well okay but I believe that premise is flawed. It still
| takes millions of years for one (which is a long time on
| human timescales) and it's more likely civilizations
| Balkanize and begin fighting each other if they even were
| to be so resource driven they wished to colonize the
| galaxy that quick which I don't think we have any reason
| to believe is true.
| belter wrote:
| Or maybe that carbon based intelligent life that wanted
| our planet it's us.
|
| We were almost wiped out after the first large impact.
| The impact that happened a few millennia after we killed
| all those awful looking smarty octopus that lived in this
| planet. But we could not defend against the large Comet,
| it come from behind the Sun and way too fast. We had
| minutes notice.
|
| Some microbes survived...And here we are again typing on
| our keyboards. :-)
| tjalfi wrote:
| The aliens in Scott Westerfeld's _Fine Prey_ invade Earth
| for a novel reason. It 's ROT-13 (https://rot13.com/)
| encoded to avoid any spoilers.
|
| Gur nyvraf ner ynathntr areqf. Gurl bpphcvrq Rnegu fb
| gung uhznaf jbhyq perngr n arj qvnyrpg bs gurve ynathntr.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > An advanced civilization close to us that is surveying the
| sky for signs of life would have very likely identified earth
| as a very promissing candidate due to the presence of methane
| and oxygen in its atmosphere at the same time.
|
| Signs of _carbon-based_ life - who is to say all forms of life
| are carbon-based? The universe is vast, what are the odds of
| aliens being in our vicinity and time (light cone) stumbling
| upon our galaxy or star?
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| > Signs of carbon-based life - who is to say all forms of
| life are carbon-based?
|
| There's a limited number of elements, and their abundance in
| the universe decreases rapidly beyond the first few. Carbon
| is by far the most advantageous for life due to its vast
| ability to form complex molecules. Silicon _might_ be a
| distant second. If there _is_ other life in the universe, and
| _if_ there 's nothing special about us, it might not _all_ be
| carbon-based, but it 's extremely likely that a large amount
| of it will be.
| inlikealamb wrote:
| >However, if a couple of these civilizations start to openly
| seek contact to others, what can the hidden ones do?
|
| Stay hidden or destroy anyone close enough to put you at risk
| along with themselves. This is a spoiler, but IIRC from the
| books the ultimate safety net was to make your solar system not
| only invisible... but _impenetrable_ in either direction but
| essentially trapping yourself in a black hole... thus removing
| yourself from the equation and hopefully satiating anyone
| watching.
|
| The time scales and distances involved meant that you weren't
| really perceived as a threat until you approached the ability
| to reach light speed, which made you stick out enough to be
| noticed in far corners of the universe. We broadcast radio, but
| it's not loud or far-reaching enough to be noticed by the far-
| out civilization destroying overlords. It _was_ loud enough for
| a different nearby civilization to come destroy us in an
| attempt to save themselves from being destroyed along with us.
|
| Of course, when applied in reality who the hell knows.
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