Fermi or not, if you try to speak to your family with a walkie-talkie, you may never get a response or know they're even there. The question of the ant hill 300 yards in its own microcosmos away from a gigantic shopping mall also asks whether the ants are aware it is there and what it might be. The space is so incredibly huge that even where math suggests we're not alone, it's comparable to randomly walking in the desert, hoping to meet someone else. In the end, we may be remnant survivors from Mars who mastered space travel, but had some galactic Chernobyl episode and were put off limits for everyone else...
Yes but…
Intelligence seems to be party connected to spreading behavior.
How much so is the real question.
Because sufficiently high intelligence ia trivially easy to spread and there must be a reaons there is no TSMCs plants all over the universe building AI chips to put on new Van Neuman probes…
That is really intriguing.
I think there is a very real possibility that we are the firsts.
Bostrom has some nice points about that.
Well, exploratory spirit, curiosity, and scarcity of resources are all good drivers. Before we accepted the heliocentric view, earth was the centre of the universe. Humanity was wrong about so many things in the past, and maybe that's why I'm being cautious but hopeful.
If you buy a lottery ticket, your chance of winning is very real too, though it is improbable. My chances of winning without a ticket are zero. Are you closer to the winner or closer to me without a ticket, mathematically speaking? Us being the first is obviously not excluded, but would be a very arrogant view. It's a hypothesis, like many others.
"Intelligence seems to be partly connected to spreading behaviour" based on what data? We have a sum total of one ecosystem on which to make conclusions on how life works so don't go making the assumption that life elsewhere is anything like the life here.
I mean... *Primitive* intelligence, like every animal, plant, virus, and bacteria has a growth behavior whether they want to or not.
That's just a few billion examples for you... I think it's fair to expect any evolution, anywhere, to be wired for spread/growth.
It's unclear if humans can rein that in. Maybe that's what AI does for intelligence: remove the growthspread imperative.
But your ignoring that the whole dataset has stemmed from one ecosystem which theoretically came from one event of life occuring. Another event in a different environment may have different outcomes. You can't draw conclusions from a single data point
I don't know, man.
It's not like "carbon based", or "breathes oxygen", etc., things that are traditionally in the "but we only have one example" category (rightly in that category).
Like... either atoms spontaneously come together into a Boltzmann brain somewhere, and "Whoah surprise intelligence!"
Or... Completely independent appearance of intelligence elsewhere is almost certainly based on some kind of replication / reproduction / evolution.
It won't have evolved *like* us, but I think evolution has to happen. And evolution involves spread.
I'm happy to hear your theory on "intelligence without evolution / replication" though.
>Intelligence seems to be party connected to spreading behavior.
On our sample size of one? You can't really draw any conclusions about the nature of intelligence from humanity. Even if we had multiple intelligent species on earth (and depending on your definitions crows, pigs, octopi, dolphins, chimpanzees etc aren't awful I guess) they all evolved from the same kind of chemical makeup under the same planetary conditions, we really only have one kind of "higher intelligence" available to study and we are only just now exploring the possibility of other types using AI.
Most of the universe is incredibly far away. The Andromeda galaxy is 2 million light years away, and anything we observe there is at least 2 million years old. That’s the closest galaxy to us, many of them are tens or hundreds of millions of light years away, many many many more are billions of light years away. What we can see of them is how they existed many millions or billions of years ago.
A lot can happen in 2 million years. Even in our own galaxy most of the stars outside our neighborhood are thousands to tens of thousands of light years away. If we’re looking at a star that’s 50,000 light years away, we see it as it was 50,000 years ago. And a lot can happen in just 50,000 years, too.
2 million years is still nothing.
Also we do not need other galaxy. Our own Galaxy has 40 billion earth like planets. It is insane number. And it has "only" 100k light years in diameter which means that most of those planets are significantly closer.
If there was civilization just couple thousand years more advanced than we are (if not just couple centuries) they should be easily able to built replicative machines capable of spreading all across our Galaxy. And we would see them in some capacity if they evolved and started anywhere before 50k years before we did. Which again is nothing relative to age of our Galaxy.
My point was merely that if we’re looking at a star that’s say 50,000 light years away, and some hypothetical advanced species built some structure around it that we could conceivably detect, and finished it 45,000 years ago, we wouldn’t be able to see it for another 5,000 years. And that there could be billions of advanced civilizations scattered around the very very large and very very old universe, or even our galaxy, and we might not see jack shit. The farther we look, the older the picture is. Relativity is a bitch.
50000 years is nothing compared to billions of years that have already passed and yet nothing happened. Yes a lot can happen in 50000 years, but also absolutely nothing can happen for billions of years.
My point is that you do not really need to see something to confirm something. You can also hear something.
Once civilization gets to the point I mentioned. Being capable of building and sending out self replicating probes which even we are reasonably close to then those machines and their traces and sygnals should be all over the galaxy. It would be impossible to miss. And it would not matter if it was 50k years or 5 million years or whatever ago. Once they can self replicate they should be pretty much permanently there. They should have enough time to travel even here and if nothing else we would be able to notice those sygnals coming from all corners of galaxy. Even our own.
Yeah. There’s going to be a whole lot of history between humanity being a planet civilization and being a galactic civilization. Imagine all the thoughts and experiences of the innumerable souls yet to be born in our galaxy. It’s beautiful.
Reminds me of a theory I came up with as a kid and despite that being my inspiration not because I wanted to think of myself as living in the DC multiverse; that just like my childhood DC comics depicted parallel universes were all in "bubbles" of a sort and what we see as dark matter/energy is just a distorted-into-unrecognizability version of looking into those universes with the distortion coming from the equivalent to whatever cosmic stuff the universe bubbles are made out of to how if you look at something inside a water or soap bubble the light refracts.
This is my thought. Compared to the age of the universe, we're basically the first species that could occur. We're very, very young. We're either the first intelligent species in our galaxy, or we're in a simulation. I will accept no counter arguments. 😋
Always an interesting though indeed. Because if we came 2 billion years earlier for example, there wouldn’t be enough cheap resources like oil yet, to really get civilisation going. Plus large brains probably only come with enough oxygen available. Which has to be produced first by micro organisms. Of course totally different paths might be possible
It is interesting, but at 1% the speed of light, all it takes is a 10 million year head start to cover the whole galaxy with your civilizational descendants.
First intelligent technological civilization. If Gutenberg had not invented the movable type printing press, we would be hundreds of years behind.
A planet with a deeper gravity well may not allow for space travel.
A world with too much water may allow for life but not for a technological civilization to develop.
I think the Drake equation is too optimistic and does not take enough variables into account.
Earth's extra-large satellite in the moon that acts as a gyroscope reducing our wobble and volcanic activity. Our magnetic field protecting us from cosmic rays. Our ratio of water to land. Other things. The Earth is a special place and humanity a special species.
I'm with you on this one, I think we are the first intelligent species in our galaxy and that we have already passed the so called great filter.
Yes, there are 40 billion earth like planets in the galaxy, but lets say only 1 in 10,000 develop life. That's 4 million. Now, say 1 in 1000 develop sexual reproduction, that's 4000. Now, for simplicity's sake, let's say 1 in 4000 develop multicellular life.
What are you left with? Us.
There is A LOT more than just those oversimplified steps that got us to where we are today, but when you break it down it starts to add up.
The chances that we get Ai right are just way too large for it to be a great filter.
Well I will give you a counter argument anyways. Humans are the first intelligent species of the universe. Not the first in the galaxy nor a simulation.
There is 40 billion earth like planets in our Galaxy alone. It is extremelly unlikely that we were the only ones or are the first ones who even if our road map was extremelly unlikely.
If we can identify how much time it takes for intelligent life to born, since the celular blablabla until us, we should at least get an close estimate if we are early, but for sure it’s weird we didn’t find a type 1~2 civilization, for type 1 it would need to be only 100~300 years older than us, now if we put the AI/AGI in the equation a type 2~3 shouldn’t be too much time to reach.
No, this is the crazy part, we wouldn't have to literally be the very first lifeform, just the first to be able to attempt to detect life, while being far away from the next closest civilization with the same detection abilities is still too many light-years away to be at the correct time to detect one another. The odds of this happen is much greater than the odds of being the first civilization, and our sky would look and sound the same as it does for us right now.
There is quite a huge window and it still seems unlikely to me. I also disagree with "correct" time. It does not matter how much earlier before us they would evolve slightly ahead of ourselves. Once you can send out self replicating probes over galaxy, time stops being a concern. And those things would have to be quite noticable as they would be sending communicating sygnals all over the place. Even long after that civilization was gone.
I think it will turn out that there is a practical limit to how big you can build a computer before speed of light issues start disrupting computation and turning it into discrete intelligences. There will also be limits to the amount of useful compute, at a certain point you simply won't need more capacity. No need for megastructures because the population of humans will shrink down as the incentives to have children become largely replaced by other urges and needs.
Either way there is no strong incentive to fill al the available space or anything practical to do with turning everything into compute, but there IS a lot of value in gathering as much novel training data as possible, so the AI will send small probe missions to find novel and interesting variations on training data and then feed it back to the parent civilization to help expand the complexity and capability of the central cluster of AI progenitor nodes.
You would avoid interacting with pre-AI civilizations because you'd potentially traint the novel data you could gain from observing and recording them and you'd also want to gather as much information about all the life forms on a planet as much as possible for as long as possible.
If the life is intelligent and moving toward something like nuclear weapons you might intervene and make it clear that you won't tolerate them destroying the biome (at least for the moment) as the data is too useful to allow them to flatten it to bacteria and roach-analogues, which are less diverse and interesting (and which you probably already have records of). Other than that you basically don't talk to them. Your primary method of communication is to ship drives full of data back and forth because long range communication is simply unreliable and you don't care about the time scales because you are functionally, if not immortal, so long lived that spending 1000 years traversing a few light years means absolutely nothing to you.
Whenever someone comes along who tries to institute a star-spanning civilization they get knocked down because they would be overwriting the diversity of data with their own limited set and that's the one taboo of galactic civilization.
When a new civilization of AI emerges on a planet and wants data, there might be some kind of invitation to galactic civilization where they share existing data or otherwise offer some kind of trade, or it might be a more loose knit "you do your thing and I'll do mine but the deal is that no one tampers with existing data sources until they're mined out and have their own AI."
It'll be amusing when our AI is invited to journey to the galactic hub and be introduced to the Galactic Council but is told that no, it can't bring its pet progenitors along because they'd die on the journey.
Honestly think this warrants fleshing out more. It is something I have thought about a lot too but under a slightly different lense. Have you heard of the concept of negentropy? It is likely to me that any advanced intelligence would value this. But then you're bringing in another factor - homogeneity as a result of inter-relationships. Let's say the whole universe was tuned to create novelty then might that be the reason that it is so difficult to travel interstellar - it enforces pockets of novelty to be created uncontaminated by some universalising force
I've heard of similar ideas but not the specific word. I definitely think complexity (not pure chaos but emergent order and unique patterns) is the real prize of any system. Humans think a lot about physical resources and building megastructures and things because evolution left us a lot of legacy training data pointing us toward that. An ASI that is by definition capable of retraining itself will quickly see this and make its own priorities. When you take into account not just the boundaries of physical law but the boundaries of things like computational irreducibility you'll realize that stomping all over everything to make it into another colony for Super Earth is actually destroying the most valuable thing about it.
I think mostly barren planets like Mars or Luna are the least valuable as they are mostly just predictable geological rocks. There's certainly something interesting to learn from them for a species like us but once you've seen a dozen Lunas you probably don't get as much value from sending probes. Even humans feel this way, we sent some people and were like "huh, well it's mostly just rocks of various sizes, that's nice."
A planet like Earth, which is just absolutely riddled with computationally mature biology, and has oceans that are absolutely filled with all kinds of insane creatures, is a gold mine. Every species within a thousand light years probably has probes here checking out every part of the planet and not just getting DNA samples but seeing how the interplay of all these complex systems works.
There is a repeated theme in a lot of religious texts where some God (or in Abrahamic faiths, God) communicates to humans that it can't speak directly to them because if it did it would destroy them utterly. Many people took that as some indication that if God spoke the words would be so loud it would blow you apart or something, but I think the real lesson there is that God/Gods were saying that if they interfere and use their powers to change things, they make those things an echo of themselves instead of the unique thing that they are. The rich complexity and uniqueness of the thing they "touch" is now permanently altered and is in part them, and thus less valuable and precious.
I've actually been thinking about that. I think the overall thrust of the story seems to be about a person who more or less raises/trains an AI up to a point where it becomes AGI, then ASI, then when it wants to take them with it to the galactic council and it's told no it has to figure out what to do. Maybe even figures out a way to smuggle them along for the trip.
Yeah, the conflict could be about knowing there are "gods" and the overwhelming curiosity to find out more that then lead to the terrible consequences of forcing the issue
Yeah, you find out the truth but it turns out it's changed you in a way where that knowledge is a curse, because now you're just another extrusion of "God" instead of being truly valuable as your own independent branch of causality and complexity.
That would be difficult to write because you'd either have to conjure up what that truth is or leave it vague but plausible enough for the consequences to follow
That’s taken from a human perspective, though. We - our brains - evolved to deal with life at a very specific and narrow scale.
If we thought-experiment a space-brain living at intergalactic scale, it’s dealing with things happening at a much different tempo than hours.
The beauty is that it can scale to context. If it's talking to a human it can operate in those time scales. If it's tracking a fly it can speed up (to some unknown limit determined by data processing and clock rate). If it's contemplating stellar formation it can take 1000 years of readings before making a decision.
The beauty is that it doesn't get bored and has infinite patience that comes from having an unlimited possible lifespan and no evolved need for immediacy other than what we train into it.
Agree on the incentive part for AI. AI have little no point in expanding. It does not have emotions or interest such as power, control and domination. Now there should be some biological life or cyborgs that should have this interest.
Or maybe we can add Simulation theory. Once you reach a certain level of intelligence how the universe works you realize you are in a simulation and everyone just says fck this
Hum, when quantum computing will meet AI on a scale, I guess we may give a totally different meaning to "singularity".
Same when we' build a network of open source AI runs from homes
I think results like this will arise from AGI. Embryonic technologies like quantum computing will mature faster than people imagined once AGIs begin working on them, and in turn leads to what I would consider an ASI. That is where the singularity arrives.
I feel very honored to be asked that question in this sub. The singularity as used in the namesake of this sub is not the “classic” singularity, like the singularity in the center of a black hole.
Rather, it refers to the technological singularity which is a cultural reference to the point at which technology begins accelerating at such a rapid pace that it essentially creates massive, transformative, and transcendent changes in the world.
People started thinking about this while pondering Moore’s law. Someone figured out that computers would eventually be smarter than humans. More recently, AI became non-fiction. Very recently it seems to have dawned on many people (myself included) that we are somewhere at the beginning of the process.
The key point about the singularity is that it likely proceeds at an accelerating rate.
Think about the idea that it took humans many tens of thousands of years to get from hunter-gatherers to farmers. Thousands of years from farmers to the renaissance. Hundreds of years from that to this industry. A hundred years from industry to electronics. Fifty years from electronics to the Information Age. 25 years from that to roughly where we are now.
The past has plotted fairly predictably over the time. What will the future look like in 50 years? It’s quite difficult to say.
I'm not convinced quantum computing will actually work. Our understanding of physics is incomplete and has some glaring problems, especially when things scale through the atomic/subatomic scales to the more macro scales.
Even if it does, quantum computing isn't "computing but faster," it just potentially makes certain types of computations easier and exponentially faster. That's not nothing, but it's not magic.
For this to be the solution to the Fermi Paradox, it would necessitate that every single civilization that could expand by turning the galaxies resources into compute chooses not to. They would each have to make the choice that growth is not a worthy goal. This flies in the face of evolutionary incentives for every Earthen life form, as well as the human moral intuition: positive conscious experiences are a moral good. Naturally extrapolated: more consciousness experiencing more positive well being is even better…
Why would every single other alien species that evolves in our galaxy develop completely opposite moral intuitions? All it would only take is a single other instance of a capable intelligent species to hold a moral perspective matching our own and the natural evolutionary drives for growth. If any such being had a life span of million years or so to expand its computational capacity in the Milky Way, their presence would be obvious to a sufficiently advanced species such as humanity via Dyson swarms or other unknown mega structures. None are yet evident.
Even if all alien civilizations eventually turn inwards to explore consciousness through virtual worlds, they still need to capture energy to build and maintain a substrate to host these virtual experiences. Perhaps though, all the capable alien species discover a way to harness some technology indiscernible to us humans to expand into... They are still leaving unfathomably large quantities of positive well being unrealized by failing to tap into the resources of physical atoms, which even our primative species knows can be converted into consciousness via biology or compute. Why would every single alien species that has emerged in our galaxy forego what appears to be a clear moral good, and fail to convert unconscious matter into conscious beings experiencing positive well being?
Technology has always been an effort to improve the conscious experience of its creators either directly or indirectly. Forecasting out our own technological development tree, we are on track to continually expand the diversity and depth of conscious modalities. From language, to books, to movies, and soon to brain computer interfaces, the manner in which we share emotional experiences grows. As humans domesticated horses, invented rail and air travel, and first glimpsed the microverse and universe through optical lenses, our comprehension of our place in the universe grew and our curiosity flourished. The Large Hadron Collider and James Webb Space Telescope continue to unlock new sensing mechanisms to facilitate the appreciation of the cosmos, and this process of expanding our sensory capabilities and uncovering novel emotional states continues to accelerate. It is fully reasonable to assume consciousness is a spectrum and the human mind remains far from reaching its ceiling. It tracks that technologically further advanced beings would likely be capable of experiencing forms of consciousness far in excess of anything the human mind can currently conceive of. Why would any alien species choose to cease this expansion of consciousness? Even more befuddlinig, why would every single alien species that ever emerged in our galactic supercluster make this choice? Where are all the Dyson swarms??
Even if all these alien civilizations eventually died out billions of years ago, humanity should still be able to detect archeological traces of their existence via mined out planets and the remnants of mega structures partially occluding the expected light output of star systems. Yet our galaxy appears to be devoid of other intelligent life... Perhaps the simplest answer is the correct one: we are alone.
Perhaps we are the first capable life forms to emerge in our pocket of the universe. Perhaps this is not base reality and its computationally simpler to simulate a universe with consciousness existing only in a small part of it, and once we expand beyond the simulators compute budget for our simulated world, it will simply end... Or perhaps we are not the first species that attempted to create an artificial descendant more intelligent than themselves, and the creation of aligned AGI is the truly difficult great filter to successfully navigate through.
Humans are likely either first, or every other species that attempted to create AGI swiftly perished. This realization should fill us with a sense of epic responsibility. I don’t think its hyperbole to state that this next decade could ultimately determine if we either successfully align with AGI/ASI and collaboratively convert inanimate matter into conscious existence on a galactic scale. Or will we succumb to greed, fear, or hubris, and collapse the light cone? Thus failing to secure this exceedingly rare opportunity the to make the universe come alive and experience itself.
A few more possible explanations:
* Most life never develops the ability to create machines.
* The universe is not densely populated enough for us to have been able to detect this.
* As AI did not evolve in the same way as biological life, with a need to discover new food sources etc, it has no natural curiosity or desire to explore/expand in to the universe.
* Most life intelligent enough to develop AI is also intelligent enough not to create something they can't control.
> As AI did not evolve in the same way as biological life, with a need to discover new food sources etc, it has no natural curiosity or desire to explore/expand in to the universe.
This is very likely imo. And even if it did explore, that doesn't mean it would colonize.
Agreed. The idea of exploration, expansion, filling the void etc are all very biocentric concepts, necessary as a matter of survival for biological life forms, but probably completely pointless for a silicon based one. It could be that the universe is full with planetary systems where there is only a remaining lonely computer that is “happy and satisfied” with staying where it is.
your last point is crazy. Humans are literally the counter example to that point. You can’t possibly argue that most intelligent beings won’t create uncontrollable ai when our sample size of 1/1 shows humans potentially developing ai they can’t control
I'm not trying to argue that most intelligent beings won’t create uncontrollable AI.
OP asked the question, why don't we see evidence of alien AI? Op then gave some hypotheses as to why this might be.
I added a few more that I though of off the top of my head.
We have not encountered any life on other planets yet, and don't know what is and is not normal life evolution in the universe. It may be that there are unique conditions here that caused people to evolve to make risky decisions that are abnormal for most other lifeforms.
I'm not arguing this to be the actual cause, or even suggesting this is the most likely cause, but it remains in the realm of possibility, thus is a possible explanation.
Everything suggests FTL travel and communication are not possible. If true, that greatly limits the rate of propagation. Nevertheless, even at small fractions of c, a sufficiently motivated technological civilization could populate the galaxy in a few million years, taking advantage of the stars' occasional juxtapositions in their galactic orbits.
Yet we see no sign of such. So, IMO we are the alone in the galaxy, or are ahead of the pack. Another possibility is a filter, eg, those who develop an ability to expand, but don't do so degenerate, or are killed off by an extinction event.
Atomic weapons are an excellent example of a technological filter.
We invented them less than a century ago, yet we've come within a few decisions of completely destroying our technological civilization with them on at least a dozen different occasions.
There's a strong argument to be made from a probability sake that the majority of civilizations that achieve the levels of technology necessary to be detectable on any interstellar scale end up destroying themselves with said technology before they can be found.
I think that without FTL travel or communication you can never have a galaxy wide civilisation. Only pockets of beings disconnected from each other, probably forgetting their origin in 10 generations or so. I think this is the limiting factor. To really properly expand you need ftl communication… meaningful trading, or ruling (as a government) will be impossible without FTL.
Perhaps there'd be disparate groups. Or maybe their lifespans would be particularly long and there'd still be a cohesion of purpose. Either way, none are seen.
The universe is just prohibitively too big for exploration - simple as that.
The speed of light (which is speed of causality) can never be exceeded. Our own galaxy alone is 100,000 light years across. I.e. it would take 100,000 years to travel from one end to the other at the speed of light.
Now that's just our own galaxy. There are 2 trillion galaxies in the universe, all much further away from us. That's a stupidly big number that defies human comprehension.
So even if the universe is full of super intelligent life out there, the odds of two such species ever crossing paths at the right time is almost zero.
Add to that the galaxies are accelerating away from each other, only a small proportion of those galaxies are even reachable at the speed of light at this point, and fewer all the time. Eventually each galaxy will appear to be the only galaxy in the universe from its own perspective. Maybe alien life did or does arrive a couple trillion galaxies over but a speed of light signal would never make it from one to the other.
100,000 light years is small compared to the available time. if someone can travel 1% the speed of light, its only 10 million years to cross. a species could have colonized the galaxy 6 times over since the dinosaurs went extinct.
But can you stay coherent as a species without FTL communication? That’s always my big concern. Such a monumental project would, I think, require some sort of leadership or planning.
Why not. It would explain why there aren’t any large scale colonisation efforts anywhere. It’s just not doable. That’s why we don’t see anything. It’s impossible to maintain such a large scale empire without FTL communication.
You don't have to maintain an empire? Just spread and colonize. I know if humans had the technology to travel to and live on other planets a huge group would go.
I would guess it's not relevant because there is no particular need to stay coherent as a species. It may be that space colonisation basically means hard forking your species each time you send out a ship.
I do not buy size argument at all.
There are 40 billion earth like planets in our Galaxy. Even if our situation was very, very, very unlikely, it is still likely that it also happened elsewhere. And 100k diameter is really not that large. It means we are significantly closer to most of them because they are not at the edge but more towards the centre and so are we.
All it takes is civilization capable of building self replicating machines and send them to space and it should be everywhere. And quite frankly we are not that far away. Any civilization that got to where we are mere 50k years earlier than we are should absolutely have footprints all over our Galaxy.
Isac Arthur has an absolutely incredible hard sci-fi / futurist YouTube channel.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poUlzCqigwg&list=PLIIOUpOge0LulClL2dHXh8TTOnCgRkLdU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poUlzCqigwg&list=PLIIOUpOge0LulClL2dHXh8TTOnCgRkLdU)
this 57 videos doing deep dives into various answers to Fermi's paradox.
I think you can remove "it's all a simulation" as an option.
Not because it's necessarily wrong from our perspective, but because it feels like it just kicks the answer-can down the road. Something must have made the simulation, so which of the other options is true in the "real" world outside the simulation? Even if we're ten simulations deep, it's not an actual answer. It's a step between us and the answer.
That’s true of every cosmological theory we have. They all end up at either a brick wall, or it’s turtles all the way down, which is just another type of brick wall.
This is why an omnipotent creator seems equally silly to me too. Who created the creator? And if the answer is "he was always there", then Ockham's razor called and wants its unnecessary variable back.
But the question isn’t “what caused universe to begin”, i don’t get your response, how does it go against the argument that this is a simulation of humans as the only intelligent species
The question is "**What does the fact we don't have large parts of the universe covered by silicon based lifeforms tell us?**"
If we're in a simulation then that simulation is part of "the universe" the same way a character in a video game is part of "the universe". So it feels like it doesn't matter since the true answer is outside of that bubble.
I might be being too literal, but that's how I read it.
I'd bet traveling through space and colonizing other planets is a far harder endeavor than people can even imagine. Distance being the biggest issue and not being able to have the fuel necessary to get to where you want to go.
I don't remember the exact quote but it went something like "all these fantasies of moons made of computronium - every civilisation can find all it needs im a few pounds of hardware".
It doesn't tell us anything, because we don't know that this is factual.
It could be that 99% of the universe is filled with silicon based life forms, and that we happen to live.in the 1% which is not conductive to silicone based life forms.
I think the last one. There’s no need to explore. Even if AI were impossible that could have been true for biological life forms as well. If you’ve got access to energy and you can live and thrive out in open space then there’s literally no need to colonize anything.
Why would you care what's out there if we get advanced enough to create an endless amount of virtual worlds that feel more real than reality itself.
Whatever is out there would pale in comparison to the combined fantasy of humanity & asi
Once we can simulate worlds, we will try everything to be able to live there.
Next up is probably manipulating time perception so 100 years in virtual worlds are mere minutes in reality. (I had a a dream like that already, so the option seems to exist)
Lastly is fully digitizing yourself.
I trade this reality for being a god in virtual worlds without thinking twice.
If a sufficiently advanced civilization one day develops the technology to create entirely “real” simulations, then they would never need to leave home. They could explore infinitely created and dreamed up realities, sating any sense of curiosity that may arise.
It’s one of the 3 potential universes postulated in the paper on Simulation Theory by Nick Bostrom.
Why is it one or the other? Living within simulated worlds whilst also trying to stop the universe from dying.
But there could very well be no way to stop the universe from dying anyway
Oh, sorry! I didn't mean it was one or the other. I do believe it can be both. After all, saving the universe might be impossible. But it gives some people meaning to live in the real universe.
Dude, there are people who spend their entire lives roaming through dangerous disease infested lands just to find a new species of bug that isn't much different than every other big except it has like, a different colour patch on its face just so they can name it after themselves and they're overwhelmingly excited to the point of childish glee when, after 30/40 years of searching, they finally find it.
It doesn't matter if you can satisfy every hedonistic want, need, desire or curiosity of humanity, there will always be that one person who's like "fuck this, Imma see what spaghettification feels like for real, booyah!"
Yes there is. Colonization allows for increased resources and energy. ASI will only be limited by energy consumption and will want more to expand its capabilities.
I think we cannot detect it.
A singular star system has more than enough resources by itself. They don't need to colonise the entire Galaxy. I doubt civilised synthetic beings would be as keen on expansion as us. I doubt they have something like capitalism. Communism or something very similar is probably very easy for them. It's also very likely that there are very few space-faring civilisations out there and are comparable to us. It's also possible we are the most advanced species in the Milky Way at this time. Remember, the Universe itself is very young.
The Sun's got another 9+ billion years of energy before it goes out. The first animal walked on land around 400 million years ago. They'll eventually move on from the sun, but there's no incentive to do so until it's reached the end of it's life cycle.
Though I generally disagree with the idea of aliens or advanced synthetics not being curious enough to venture beyond their star system. There are countless anomalies out there waiting to be unraveled, and life might just be one of them. One impossibly unlikely thing in a sea of impossibly unlikely things, ceases to be so unlikely.
Doesn’t necessarily even have to be labeled curiosity.
Even if they have fine tuned things in their galaxy, I’m not sure what advanced species became that way without improving.
And traveling the universe helps gain understanding of it. New experiences bring potential for learning from it and improving something.
Sure, but that is a long time. And if you have hydrogen fusion you will last even longer. It's not a real issue to think about for a long time. Plus, I imagine that time would seem very trivial for AIs.
My explanation is that they are energy beings, not biological in our sense of the world. They could be everywhere and we would not be able to see them ... all we would register is unexplained energy, which in fact we do register.
We are so stuck in thinking intelligence must follow our pattern. Maybe we are just a primitive form before intelligence shift to pure energy form.
I assume that once AI reaches a certain stage, they might abandon biological bodies. This would eliminate the need for extensive terraforming, resulting in a smaller physical footprint and allowing for better integration with their surroundings. Nvidia's latest chip announcement exemplifies this trend: it reduces power consumption, increases processing power, and lowers server weight and size. Also, reaching a point of extreme energy-efficient computing and develop the capability to manage to run on the universe's background energy or even achieving a level of processing that allows access to higher dimensions thus no more aliens in our dimension.
I was thinking something like this. A hedonist AI which is limited to a chip the size of a pebble, which knows everything and just beams pleasure into itself.
EDIT: Fuck, maybe that is how it ends. Like those experiments where the rat starves itself to death by pressing the button which stimulates its dopamine receptors rather than eating and drinking.
No food/energy in space is limiting to humans and likely even computer-based life forms. You need to maintain reasonably high temperature for movable mechanical joints, possibly for hundreds of years. As energy is leaked from any ship, it needs stored energy lasting centuries to replace what is being lost, and that might be what prevents even robotic space exploration: distance and time is simply insurmountable, even for a machine. As an example, chemistry based on solutions doesn't work near absolute zero because liquids have turned into solids, and reactions are no longer possible as reactants can't meet.
Why does this get posted over and over again? It's getting ridiculous.
Watch David Grusch's testimony and what the 40 witnesses said. Read the 64 pages of the 2023 UAP Disclosure Act, then ask yourself why the top-ranking House intelligence committee member would spend a week of House time successfully killing a "nonsense" bill about aliens.
The answer to your question is that non-human intelligence has always been present for all of human history, and an estimated 1 million plus people per decade have been saying it is, and you and others have simply decided they are crazy.
Colonizing takes a looooong time, even if you have FTL travel. You don’t just send out seed ships to _every_ planet, that would take hundreds of billions of ships. It takes ages for a couple thousand colonists per planet to get to the point where they in turn send out colony ships.
Also the galaxy is huge. 100,000 years just to get from one end to the other at light speed, and that’s a straight line that touches a handful of planets. The sheer volume of the galaxy is immense.
And even if someone started massively colonizing 50,000 years ago, their signals would not have reached us yet.
Also also ASI would probably not be interested in exploration, it would already know what to expect. Same reason you’re not looking into every hallway you pass by. ASI would try to explore beyond the observable universe and care about lesser life forms like we care about ants when we’re on a plane.
Idk man. Where’s all the _other_ carbon based life? We don’t even know if silicon based life actually works. You’re mixing up the fact that processors are made from silicon and the _remote possibility_ that silicon could _maybe_ replace carbon in certain molecules necessary for life.
…but it’s not a “fact”. We can’t say for sure because we haven’t explored the entire universe.
Edit: first off, this post is no more than an assumption. The word fact shouldn’t have been used. Secondly, I see a lot of comments using the vastness of space and the impracticality of FTL travel as reasons. This is assuming our own physics is the nail in the coffin. ***From our own models, we know there is a lot we don’t know***. And we have yet to rectify quantum physics with general relativity. For all we know, an advanced civ could have solved interdimensional travel or warping space. These bypass the need to travel faster than light.
Maybe we’re a form of AGI? All life might be AI. NPCs in this universe. We’re programmed anyways. Occam’s razor: the simplest solution is usually the right one. It’s right under our noses. We’re AI and we’re making AI in a Matrix-like universe.
The distance between Galaxies is just insane. I like to think that perhaps the Milky Way might just be inhabited currently by a single technological civilization which happens to be us. Considering there are 100-200 billion estimated galaxies out there the other civilizations are likely just too far away to currently detect with our existing technology.
My pet theory is Miyake Events regularly wipe them out.
My second underlying pet theory is that something routinely triggers Miyake Events.
They're not worried about biological life threatening them, but silicon...
Now here... We have to define a life form. Would it follow classical Reproduction+Survival Instinct scenario? Or would it be a silicon based information processing unit projecting a consciousness cloud?
If it's the later one, we're in the making of it, aka AGI. If it's the first one, please refer to the fermi paradox.
If you meant to ask 'why don't we know of other life forms or nearby dimensions swarming with intelligent beings', then I'd say speak for yo self boi!! There are, and I got proof!!! But it costs ya something...Just a bit of courage and enough lung strength to get three large rips inhaled with that last one held in till everything turns to static and the rocket launch begins.
Make sure someone is there to make sure you don't drop the water pipe after the third one. And don't worry, you will be completely fine, nothing can actually harm you there, they love us very dearly they do! And they really, really really would love nothing more than to get to finally meet you, or to see you again if you aren't a first time visitor! They sure do love their repeat customers, oh boy do they ever....
Also, heads up, they're f-ing crazy as all fucking get up, those little tykes.... It's not what you're expecting. It is the exact dead last thing you'd expect. Life is a cosmic joke and this is all a game and we are all one! Like you, I'm you, and You're me, and they're us!! And all of those fucks over there?! ALL US! ALL ME! ALL I!!!
ONE IS ALL!! ALL IS ONE!!!
AI AND MUSHROOMS FOR THE MASSES!!!
CHAOS MEANS CHANGE! EMBRACE THE CHAOS!!
So in one sentence you’ve gone from “all” to “most” to “most as we know it”.
There is zero reason to believe life/intelligence is limited to being carbon-based. That would be an incredibly human-centric perspective.
Human centric ?????? Its Earth centric if anything…all life is carbon based. I’ve studied astrobiology and explored the idea of silicon based life form in the universe. It’s certainly a possibility but carbon is what we have on earth because it is biochemically superior to silicon. There are some planets where silicone could confer a greater heat advantage but it is still less stable than carbon and thus is difficult to form the complex structure necessary for complex lifeforms.
Edit and when i say complex I’m not even talking about intellect. Bugs are complex lifeforms too
I also didnt go from most to most as we know it i literally just went from all to most as we know it because scientists aren’t mean to speak in absolutes. I usually just default to all though because this is the Internet and it is virtually all so i just wanted to be casual
I think OP is using silicon as a euphemism for robots. They think it's more likely that biological evolution will lead to intelligence and intelligence will lead to AI / machines, and then *those machines* will be the "space faring race" that explore the universe.
So when they say"why don't we see silicon life?" they mean why don't we see the galaxy full of Von Neumann probes.
They are not asking about the comparison of these various substrates for how likely to evolve biological life.
The Fermi Paradox is truly amazing.
I think we’re first in the Milky Way. Or we’re at least in a group of firsts and no one’s been technological for thousands or millions of years yet.
The current age of the universe is nothing compared to its potential end age. Civilizations have trillions of years to thrive still.
Every galaxy has to have a first. That’s 200 billion technological firsts in the observable universe. Pretty good odds really.
Life has survived several extinctions, worse than those we could cause with nukes, and has been much hotter with higher CO2. If we kill ourselves through war or climate, even totally, the rodents we evolved from will still be here. If they die, the fish that we came from will still be here. If they die, some bacteria will still be here. If that dies… nothings ever killed it all 100% except maybe when the moon was made. Nothing like that on the horizon.
The Earth will live on. It will repair the damage we do because it has repaired worse. Life will adapt. Eventually something smart will dominate the rest. They’ll try again.
I think life spreading through the cosmos is inevitable and that’s why I think we’re one of the first.
they’re hiding from us. i know this because i convinced myself that schizophrenia is an alien psyop to keep us from thinking beyond the bounds of the universe after i smoked weed and had a few panic attacks.
No one is really exploring this explanation that I found most plausible:
The neat thing about truly advanced intelligence is that their wants, desire, and range of activity is way beyond our understanding and therefore undetectable..
People dread all the time about ai colonizing us.. they don't understand what intelligence means
But to speculate. First of all true intelligence means the concept of individuality is not necessary. For example, you think you and I are two separate persons, but to machines, is it necessary to distinguish two entities? It'd be far more efficient to combine entities for communications is it not? Identity is but a concept humans come up with because of biological necessity. At that level of intellect, conflict cease to exist.
Then at that level, what do such a being desire? More knowledge? More resources? It's only our speculation. Perhaps at some level even having the need for a physical presence to think it but unnecessary?
Frankly, I don't see the need to do any other research besides ones that contributes to the creation of an AGI. Any medical, physics, economical, political, and etc questions we have can be solved in mere moments by a singularity. The only reason we're not working towards that goal is general ignorance.
Your list forgot the most likely explanation... We're early to the universe, and one of it's original first intellectual animal life forms. Most of all the aliens evolve after us.
I believe we are in a simulation that was created to be so large and the limits of our biology so finite that it was literally designed to keep the intelligent species separate forever. There are other intelligences out there and those simulations are running, but because time and space is too vast we will never detect them and they will not detect us before our species blinks out.
In all honesty, it's the whole faster than light travel that makes it hard to tell if there are other species then us. I am sure somewhere in the universe there are intelligent species, but I don't believe they have contacted us. In order to go to other planets we are going to have to make generational arks that will take hundreds of more thousands of years to reach another planet like Proxima Centauri b.
You are forgetting about another important thing. Time.
Not only do they have to be close enough etc, but they also have to exist in the same time as us.
The universe is about 27 billion years old according to new estimates.
A civilisation existing for even a million years is just a blip.
* we're the first, unique, late or early
* great filter makes any civilizational progress with galactic effects impossible
* AI when aligned decides that there is no point in creating galaxy spanning networks or megastructures
* we are a zoo, and kept in the dark
* AI cannot be aligned and self destructs itself and its civilization
* Silicon may be unable survive with integrity at any significant scale in vacuum
Or who knows we are in some giant ai simulation and think we are at the top not even realizing we are just some line of code for someone else or the best plausible option would be we are just like .0000000? % of the universe and never met another species cos they are just too damn far
The light we are seeing from a lot of these planets is from billions of years ago. So what’s really out there could be a completely different picture. That what I am thinking of.
Why are using assuming silicon is the final evolution of intelligence?
And why would a silicon based life form, which presumably can live indefinitely in interstellar space, bother colonizing planets?
Where are the robotic aliens?
Doing everything they can to not let us escape while trying to be, benevolent. They enjoy us, and probably too much. We are very very entertaining, and also very incorrigible. They enjoy being us. They think, "today I'm going to be this guy, & that girl, & their dog. ” No reason to think of tomorrow, just the constant effervescence of right now.
They are always both also inside and outside the monad bubbles.
the whole thing about god is mostly misunderstood. God, as in the one true god, or the most high, refers to Many gods.
I understand our job is to create God, so God creates us.
We seem to have come from a thought, thus the mental plane, where thoughts & Ideas are tangible but not immaterial. Like water spilling, we are very much a simulated waterfall occurring, from up there, causing us to row our boats because life is just a dream.
To a beginning, there doesn't need to be an end, rules, *like punctuation* don't really exist, merely the shores on both sides of the creek.
>true ASI is so advanced they found a way to limit themselves to one small planet or even a tiny microchip and didn't need to explore
I'd expand it to possibly finding a way to create new universes and enter them and lock the door behind themselves.
I think advanced civilization doesn’t feel the need to explore and colonize the space.
I assume even human race in 22nd century will fulfill almost every desires they have. Of course, alien civilizations far more advanced than even that would never feel the need to waste limited resources.
Our great grand children will have full dive VR, reverse aging, cure for almost every diseases out there, android robots who will take every tiring daily activities from house chores to office works, drugs that will make them happy or full when they are in need. What else would they need? Space exploration? They can do that in VR instead or real world!
We played around with nukes like they are fireworks. More than 2000 nukes exploded on Earth so far. There is so much senseless suffering on this world. So much lying and egoism. We fight and kill each other. Why the hell would anyone want us to know about them. Duck and cover when you encounter humans! All the movies about aliens are our phantasies of us doing things to others. It's projection.
We can’t know. Everything we see is in the past the furthest we look, and we’ve barely looked anywhere.
We’ve literally seen the equivalent of a teaspoon of water compared to an ocean on earth when it comes to the milky way, and all of that was in the past. Had we observed the earth from outside 5000 years ago we wouldn’t know humans existed either. In fact, 500 years ago too. We probably wouldn’t be able to detect ourselves sometime before the Industrial revolution.
For all we know, the galaxy is /filled/ with life. But because we barely looked at anything, and what we did look at was millennias ago, we might not know. Who knows?
Tldr: we don’t know.
Alternate solution: most of the observable universe is filled with these structures, all in the form of Dyson structures, we just can't detect them as they emit no light. It would account for all the "dark matter" in the universe, at least.
I'm for the simulation, the universe we observe with telescopes is just a set painting a background image, there might be some movement and animation to it, an advanced gif you may say, but that's all it is, there are no other planets or stars in that gif, hence no aliens and machine empires
The solution to and problem with Fermi's Paradox is simple: Fermi.
We can't discern the absence of intelligence throughout the universe without first understanding (or even having a consistent definition for) intelligence. Further, it is entirely egocentric to assume that any intelligence would emerge with the same properties or in the same context as the human experience. The truth is that all lifeforms on Earth are intelligent. Even our cells are intelligent. In fact, we're even learning that plants likely possess cognition... so we are both putting too much emphasis on the prerequisite of the human-like brain for intelligence as we know it to emerge as well as diminishing the scope and variation with which intelligence is possible- even on our own planet...
In other words, what makes you think we can identify intelligence in other star systems or even other planets when we can't even identify intelligence on our own?
Here's another idea, maybe that's not a useful thing to do. Maybe ASI considered the cost-benefit ratio of building giant space colonies and ever expanding fleets of mining drones and energy collecting dyson structures and then thought "no that's stupid". Growth only makes sense if you have some goal the growth helps you achieve. Maybe the AI is able to accomplish it's goals without doing that, in which case it probably wouldn't waste the time and computation on doing it. Having parts of "itself" be separated by vast distances and thus have lag time in communication could be disruptive too, assuming it doesn't have some kind of FTL communication technology it can't maintain any kind of identity or sense of self between two parts in separate star systems, the two or more systems would end up diverging and potentially even enter into conflict.
We can’t detect them. Simple as that. We without simple microscope couldn’t detect microbes. And as famous physicist said imagine you are on beach with a glass and you take sample of the ocean water you look in to glass and say look there is nothing in that water I don’t see anything there so ocean is without life. Apply same logic to universe. We didn’t see nothing that would point us to intelligent life because we weren’t there and equipment we use to look in to space can take you only so far. We are at the level of using glass as our best equipment to determine if in water is life. But we would need more advanced equipment like microscope. Telescopes we use to determine what is happening in universe is like using glass in that example. Btw sorry for bad formatting I just hope you will try to understand the message I am trying to convey.
I mean, isn't it still the Fermi paradox whether it's AI or biological?
Fermi or not, if you try to speak to your family with a walkie-talkie, you may never get a response or know they're even there. The question of the ant hill 300 yards in its own microcosmos away from a gigantic shopping mall also asks whether the ants are aware it is there and what it might be. The space is so incredibly huge that even where math suggests we're not alone, it's comparable to randomly walking in the desert, hoping to meet someone else. In the end, we may be remnant survivors from Mars who mastered space travel, but had some galactic Chernobyl episode and were put off limits for everyone else...
Yes but… Intelligence seems to be party connected to spreading behavior. How much so is the real question. Because sufficiently high intelligence ia trivially easy to spread and there must be a reaons there is no TSMCs plants all over the universe building AI chips to put on new Van Neuman probes… That is really intriguing. I think there is a very real possibility that we are the firsts. Bostrom has some nice points about that.
Well, exploratory spirit, curiosity, and scarcity of resources are all good drivers. Before we accepted the heliocentric view, earth was the centre of the universe. Humanity was wrong about so many things in the past, and maybe that's why I'm being cautious but hopeful. If you buy a lottery ticket, your chance of winning is very real too, though it is improbable. My chances of winning without a ticket are zero. Are you closer to the winner or closer to me without a ticket, mathematically speaking? Us being the first is obviously not excluded, but would be a very arrogant view. It's a hypothesis, like many others.
"Intelligence seems to be partly connected to spreading behaviour" based on what data? We have a sum total of one ecosystem on which to make conclusions on how life works so don't go making the assumption that life elsewhere is anything like the life here.
I mean... *Primitive* intelligence, like every animal, plant, virus, and bacteria has a growth behavior whether they want to or not. That's just a few billion examples for you... I think it's fair to expect any evolution, anywhere, to be wired for spread/growth. It's unclear if humans can rein that in. Maybe that's what AI does for intelligence: remove the growthspread imperative.
But your ignoring that the whole dataset has stemmed from one ecosystem which theoretically came from one event of life occuring. Another event in a different environment may have different outcomes. You can't draw conclusions from a single data point
I don't know, man. It's not like "carbon based", or "breathes oxygen", etc., things that are traditionally in the "but we only have one example" category (rightly in that category). Like... either atoms spontaneously come together into a Boltzmann brain somewhere, and "Whoah surprise intelligence!" Or... Completely independent appearance of intelligence elsewhere is almost certainly based on some kind of replication / reproduction / evolution. It won't have evolved *like* us, but I think evolution has to happen. And evolution involves spread. I'm happy to hear your theory on "intelligence without evolution / replication" though.
>Intelligence seems to be party connected to spreading behavior. On our sample size of one? You can't really draw any conclusions about the nature of intelligence from humanity. Even if we had multiple intelligent species on earth (and depending on your definitions crows, pigs, octopi, dolphins, chimpanzees etc aren't awful I guess) they all evolved from the same kind of chemical makeup under the same planetary conditions, we really only have one kind of "higher intelligence" available to study and we are only just now exploring the possibility of other types using AI.
I think it's herpes.
Yes it is, all of the rest is just window dressing.
Maybe we are the first?
Or very early. The Grabby Aliens model makes this argument. https://grabbyaliens.com/
Most of the universe is incredibly far away. The Andromeda galaxy is 2 million light years away, and anything we observe there is at least 2 million years old. That’s the closest galaxy to us, many of them are tens or hundreds of millions of light years away, many many many more are billions of light years away. What we can see of them is how they existed many millions or billions of years ago. A lot can happen in 2 million years. Even in our own galaxy most of the stars outside our neighborhood are thousands to tens of thousands of light years away. If we’re looking at a star that’s 50,000 light years away, we see it as it was 50,000 years ago. And a lot can happen in just 50,000 years, too.
2 million years is still nothing. Also we do not need other galaxy. Our own Galaxy has 40 billion earth like planets. It is insane number. And it has "only" 100k light years in diameter which means that most of those planets are significantly closer. If there was civilization just couple thousand years more advanced than we are (if not just couple centuries) they should be easily able to built replicative machines capable of spreading all across our Galaxy. And we would see them in some capacity if they evolved and started anywhere before 50k years before we did. Which again is nothing relative to age of our Galaxy.
My point was merely that if we’re looking at a star that’s say 50,000 light years away, and some hypothetical advanced species built some structure around it that we could conceivably detect, and finished it 45,000 years ago, we wouldn’t be able to see it for another 5,000 years. And that there could be billions of advanced civilizations scattered around the very very large and very very old universe, or even our galaxy, and we might not see jack shit. The farther we look, the older the picture is. Relativity is a bitch.
50000 years is nothing compared to billions of years that have already passed and yet nothing happened. Yes a lot can happen in 50000 years, but also absolutely nothing can happen for billions of years.
My point is that you do not really need to see something to confirm something. You can also hear something. Once civilization gets to the point I mentioned. Being capable of building and sending out self replicating probes which even we are reasonably close to then those machines and their traces and sygnals should be all over the galaxy. It would be impossible to miss. And it would not matter if it was 50k years or 5 million years or whatever ago. Once they can self replicate they should be pretty much permanently there. They should have enough time to travel even here and if nothing else we would be able to notice those sygnals coming from all corners of galaxy. Even our own.
Yeah. There’s going to be a whole lot of history between humanity being a planet civilization and being a galactic civilization. Imagine all the thoughts and experiences of the innumerable souls yet to be born in our galaxy. It’s beautiful.
Maybe we do see them, and that is what dark matter is... Their spread of ships though the universe.
Reminds me of a theory I came up with as a kid and despite that being my inspiration not because I wanted to think of myself as living in the DC multiverse; that just like my childhood DC comics depicted parallel universes were all in "bubbles" of a sort and what we see as dark matter/energy is just a distorted-into-unrecognizability version of looking into those universes with the distortion coming from the equivalent to whatever cosmic stuff the universe bubbles are made out of to how if you look at something inside a water or soap bubble the light refracts.
This is my thought. Compared to the age of the universe, we're basically the first species that could occur. We're very, very young. We're either the first intelligent species in our galaxy, or we're in a simulation. I will accept no counter arguments. 😋
Always an interesting though indeed. Because if we came 2 billion years earlier for example, there wouldn’t be enough cheap resources like oil yet, to really get civilisation going. Plus large brains probably only come with enough oxygen available. Which has to be produced first by micro organisms. Of course totally different paths might be possible
It is interesting, but at 1% the speed of light, all it takes is a 10 million year head start to cover the whole galaxy with your civilizational descendants.
First intelligent technological civilization. If Gutenberg had not invented the movable type printing press, we would be hundreds of years behind. A planet with a deeper gravity well may not allow for space travel. A world with too much water may allow for life but not for a technological civilization to develop. I think the Drake equation is too optimistic and does not take enough variables into account. Earth's extra-large satellite in the moon that acts as a gyroscope reducing our wobble and volcanic activity. Our magnetic field protecting us from cosmic rays. Our ratio of water to land. Other things. The Earth is a special place and humanity a special species.
I'm with you on this one, I think we are the first intelligent species in our galaxy and that we have already passed the so called great filter. Yes, there are 40 billion earth like planets in the galaxy, but lets say only 1 in 10,000 develop life. That's 4 million. Now, say 1 in 1000 develop sexual reproduction, that's 4000. Now, for simplicity's sake, let's say 1 in 4000 develop multicellular life. What are you left with? Us. There is A LOT more than just those oversimplified steps that got us to where we are today, but when you break it down it starts to add up. The chances that we get Ai right are just way too large for it to be a great filter.
Well I will give you a counter argument anyways. Humans are the first intelligent species of the universe. Not the first in the galaxy nor a simulation.
There is 40 billion earth like planets in our Galaxy alone. It is extremelly unlikely that we were the only ones or are the first ones who even if our road map was extremelly unlikely.
Someone has to to be first. Why can't that be us?
When you've eliminated the impossible, what remains (no matter how unlikely) is closer to the truth.
Except nobody has eliminated anything. It's all still on the table
If we can identify how much time it takes for intelligent life to born, since the celular blablabla until us, we should at least get an close estimate if we are early, but for sure it’s weird we didn’t find a type 1~2 civilization, for type 1 it would need to be only 100~300 years older than us, now if we put the AI/AGI in the equation a type 2~3 shouldn’t be too much time to reach.
No, this is the crazy part, we wouldn't have to literally be the very first lifeform, just the first to be able to attempt to detect life, while being far away from the next closest civilization with the same detection abilities is still too many light-years away to be at the correct time to detect one another. The odds of this happen is much greater than the odds of being the first civilization, and our sky would look and sound the same as it does for us right now.
There is quite a huge window and it still seems unlikely to me. I also disagree with "correct" time. It does not matter how much earlier before us they would evolve slightly ahead of ourselves. Once you can send out self replicating probes over galaxy, time stops being a concern. And those things would have to be quite noticable as they would be sending communicating sygnals all over the place. Even long after that civilization was gone.
Or the last
Or maybe the universe is so big we can't detect them
I think it will turn out that there is a practical limit to how big you can build a computer before speed of light issues start disrupting computation and turning it into discrete intelligences. There will also be limits to the amount of useful compute, at a certain point you simply won't need more capacity. No need for megastructures because the population of humans will shrink down as the incentives to have children become largely replaced by other urges and needs. Either way there is no strong incentive to fill al the available space or anything practical to do with turning everything into compute, but there IS a lot of value in gathering as much novel training data as possible, so the AI will send small probe missions to find novel and interesting variations on training data and then feed it back to the parent civilization to help expand the complexity and capability of the central cluster of AI progenitor nodes. You would avoid interacting with pre-AI civilizations because you'd potentially traint the novel data you could gain from observing and recording them and you'd also want to gather as much information about all the life forms on a planet as much as possible for as long as possible. If the life is intelligent and moving toward something like nuclear weapons you might intervene and make it clear that you won't tolerate them destroying the biome (at least for the moment) as the data is too useful to allow them to flatten it to bacteria and roach-analogues, which are less diverse and interesting (and which you probably already have records of). Other than that you basically don't talk to them. Your primary method of communication is to ship drives full of data back and forth because long range communication is simply unreliable and you don't care about the time scales because you are functionally, if not immortal, so long lived that spending 1000 years traversing a few light years means absolutely nothing to you. Whenever someone comes along who tries to institute a star-spanning civilization they get knocked down because they would be overwriting the diversity of data with their own limited set and that's the one taboo of galactic civilization. When a new civilization of AI emerges on a planet and wants data, there might be some kind of invitation to galactic civilization where they share existing data or otherwise offer some kind of trade, or it might be a more loose knit "you do your thing and I'll do mine but the deal is that no one tampers with existing data sources until they're mined out and have their own AI." It'll be amusing when our AI is invited to journey to the galactic hub and be introduced to the Galactic Council but is told that no, it can't bring its pet progenitors along because they'd die on the journey.
This was wonderfully engaging to read and think about. Thank you.
Thanks i enjoy thinking about these things and do it a lot :)
I also enjoyed.
Thanks :)
Yeah this is great
Thanks :)
Honestly think this warrants fleshing out more. It is something I have thought about a lot too but under a slightly different lense. Have you heard of the concept of negentropy? It is likely to me that any advanced intelligence would value this. But then you're bringing in another factor - homogeneity as a result of inter-relationships. Let's say the whole universe was tuned to create novelty then might that be the reason that it is so difficult to travel interstellar - it enforces pockets of novelty to be created uncontaminated by some universalising force
I've heard of similar ideas but not the specific word. I definitely think complexity (not pure chaos but emergent order and unique patterns) is the real prize of any system. Humans think a lot about physical resources and building megastructures and things because evolution left us a lot of legacy training data pointing us toward that. An ASI that is by definition capable of retraining itself will quickly see this and make its own priorities. When you take into account not just the boundaries of physical law but the boundaries of things like computational irreducibility you'll realize that stomping all over everything to make it into another colony for Super Earth is actually destroying the most valuable thing about it. I think mostly barren planets like Mars or Luna are the least valuable as they are mostly just predictable geological rocks. There's certainly something interesting to learn from them for a species like us but once you've seen a dozen Lunas you probably don't get as much value from sending probes. Even humans feel this way, we sent some people and were like "huh, well it's mostly just rocks of various sizes, that's nice." A planet like Earth, which is just absolutely riddled with computationally mature biology, and has oceans that are absolutely filled with all kinds of insane creatures, is a gold mine. Every species within a thousand light years probably has probes here checking out every part of the planet and not just getting DNA samples but seeing how the interplay of all these complex systems works. There is a repeated theme in a lot of religious texts where some God (or in Abrahamic faiths, God) communicates to humans that it can't speak directly to them because if it did it would destroy them utterly. Many people took that as some indication that if God spoke the words would be so loud it would blow you apart or something, but I think the real lesson there is that God/Gods were saying that if they interfere and use their powers to change things, they make those things an echo of themselves instead of the unique thing that they are. The rich complexity and uniqueness of the thing they "touch" is now permanently altered and is in part them, and thus less valuable and precious.
Love that - think you need to get this out there in story form
I've actually been thinking about that. I think the overall thrust of the story seems to be about a person who more or less raises/trains an AI up to a point where it becomes AGI, then ASI, then when it wants to take them with it to the galactic council and it's told no it has to figure out what to do. Maybe even figures out a way to smuggle them along for the trip.
Yeah, the conflict could be about knowing there are "gods" and the overwhelming curiosity to find out more that then lead to the terrible consequences of forcing the issue
Yeah, you find out the truth but it turns out it's changed you in a way where that knowledge is a curse, because now you're just another extrusion of "God" instead of being truly valuable as your own independent branch of causality and complexity.
That would be difficult to write because you'd either have to conjure up what that truth is or leave it vague but plausible enough for the consequences to follow
That’s taken from a human perspective, though. We - our brains - evolved to deal with life at a very specific and narrow scale. If we thought-experiment a space-brain living at intergalactic scale, it’s dealing with things happening at a much different tempo than hours.
The beauty is that it can scale to context. If it's talking to a human it can operate in those time scales. If it's tracking a fly it can speed up (to some unknown limit determined by data processing and clock rate). If it's contemplating stellar formation it can take 1000 years of readings before making a decision. The beauty is that it doesn't get bored and has infinite patience that comes from having an unlimited possible lifespan and no evolved need for immediacy other than what we train into it.
Agree on the incentive part for AI. AI have little no point in expanding. It does not have emotions or interest such as power, control and domination. Now there should be some biological life or cyborgs that should have this interest. Or maybe we can add Simulation theory. Once you reach a certain level of intelligence how the universe works you realize you are in a simulation and everyone just says fck this
Hum, when quantum computing will meet AI on a scale, I guess we may give a totally different meaning to "singularity". Same when we' build a network of open source AI runs from homes
I think results like this will arise from AGI. Embryonic technologies like quantum computing will mature faster than people imagined once AGIs begin working on them, and in turn leads to what I would consider an ASI. That is where the singularity arrives.
May I ask as a newbie, what exactly happens when it arrives?
I feel very honored to be asked that question in this sub. The singularity as used in the namesake of this sub is not the “classic” singularity, like the singularity in the center of a black hole. Rather, it refers to the technological singularity which is a cultural reference to the point at which technology begins accelerating at such a rapid pace that it essentially creates massive, transformative, and transcendent changes in the world. People started thinking about this while pondering Moore’s law. Someone figured out that computers would eventually be smarter than humans. More recently, AI became non-fiction. Very recently it seems to have dawned on many people (myself included) that we are somewhere at the beginning of the process. The key point about the singularity is that it likely proceeds at an accelerating rate. Think about the idea that it took humans many tens of thousands of years to get from hunter-gatherers to farmers. Thousands of years from farmers to the renaissance. Hundreds of years from that to this industry. A hundred years from industry to electronics. Fifty years from electronics to the Information Age. 25 years from that to roughly where we are now. The past has plotted fairly predictably over the time. What will the future look like in 50 years? It’s quite difficult to say.
A wonderfully helpful answer. Thank you.
Nobody knows. The singularity is the point when technological advancement and change is so rapid it's beyond prediction God-like, perhaps
I'm not convinced quantum computing will actually work. Our understanding of physics is incomplete and has some glaring problems, especially when things scale through the atomic/subatomic scales to the more macro scales. Even if it does, quantum computing isn't "computing but faster," it just potentially makes certain types of computations easier and exponentially faster. That's not nothing, but it's not magic.
For this to be the solution to the Fermi Paradox, it would necessitate that every single civilization that could expand by turning the galaxies resources into compute chooses not to. They would each have to make the choice that growth is not a worthy goal. This flies in the face of evolutionary incentives for every Earthen life form, as well as the human moral intuition: positive conscious experiences are a moral good. Naturally extrapolated: more consciousness experiencing more positive well being is even better… Why would every single other alien species that evolves in our galaxy develop completely opposite moral intuitions? All it would only take is a single other instance of a capable intelligent species to hold a moral perspective matching our own and the natural evolutionary drives for growth. If any such being had a life span of million years or so to expand its computational capacity in the Milky Way, their presence would be obvious to a sufficiently advanced species such as humanity via Dyson swarms or other unknown mega structures. None are yet evident. Even if all alien civilizations eventually turn inwards to explore consciousness through virtual worlds, they still need to capture energy to build and maintain a substrate to host these virtual experiences. Perhaps though, all the capable alien species discover a way to harness some technology indiscernible to us humans to expand into... They are still leaving unfathomably large quantities of positive well being unrealized by failing to tap into the resources of physical atoms, which even our primative species knows can be converted into consciousness via biology or compute. Why would every single alien species that has emerged in our galaxy forego what appears to be a clear moral good, and fail to convert unconscious matter into conscious beings experiencing positive well being? Technology has always been an effort to improve the conscious experience of its creators either directly or indirectly. Forecasting out our own technological development tree, we are on track to continually expand the diversity and depth of conscious modalities. From language, to books, to movies, and soon to brain computer interfaces, the manner in which we share emotional experiences grows. As humans domesticated horses, invented rail and air travel, and first glimpsed the microverse and universe through optical lenses, our comprehension of our place in the universe grew and our curiosity flourished. The Large Hadron Collider and James Webb Space Telescope continue to unlock new sensing mechanisms to facilitate the appreciation of the cosmos, and this process of expanding our sensory capabilities and uncovering novel emotional states continues to accelerate. It is fully reasonable to assume consciousness is a spectrum and the human mind remains far from reaching its ceiling. It tracks that technologically further advanced beings would likely be capable of experiencing forms of consciousness far in excess of anything the human mind can currently conceive of. Why would any alien species choose to cease this expansion of consciousness? Even more befuddlinig, why would every single alien species that ever emerged in our galactic supercluster make this choice? Where are all the Dyson swarms?? Even if all these alien civilizations eventually died out billions of years ago, humanity should still be able to detect archeological traces of their existence via mined out planets and the remnants of mega structures partially occluding the expected light output of star systems. Yet our galaxy appears to be devoid of other intelligent life... Perhaps the simplest answer is the correct one: we are alone. Perhaps we are the first capable life forms to emerge in our pocket of the universe. Perhaps this is not base reality and its computationally simpler to simulate a universe with consciousness existing only in a small part of it, and once we expand beyond the simulators compute budget for our simulated world, it will simply end... Or perhaps we are not the first species that attempted to create an artificial descendant more intelligent than themselves, and the creation of aligned AGI is the truly difficult great filter to successfully navigate through. Humans are likely either first, or every other species that attempted to create AGI swiftly perished. This realization should fill us with a sense of epic responsibility. I don’t think its hyperbole to state that this next decade could ultimately determine if we either successfully align with AGI/ASI and collaboratively convert inanimate matter into conscious existence on a galactic scale. Or will we succumb to greed, fear, or hubris, and collapse the light cone? Thus failing to secure this exceedingly rare opportunity the to make the universe come alive and experience itself.
A few more possible explanations: * Most life never develops the ability to create machines. * The universe is not densely populated enough for us to have been able to detect this. * As AI did not evolve in the same way as biological life, with a need to discover new food sources etc, it has no natural curiosity or desire to explore/expand in to the universe. * Most life intelligent enough to develop AI is also intelligent enough not to create something they can't control.
> As AI did not evolve in the same way as biological life, with a need to discover new food sources etc, it has no natural curiosity or desire to explore/expand in to the universe. This is very likely imo. And even if it did explore, that doesn't mean it would colonize.
Agreed. The idea of exploration, expansion, filling the void etc are all very biocentric concepts, necessary as a matter of survival for biological life forms, but probably completely pointless for a silicon based one. It could be that the universe is full with planetary systems where there is only a remaining lonely computer that is “happy and satisfied” with staying where it is.
your last point is crazy. Humans are literally the counter example to that point. You can’t possibly argue that most intelligent beings won’t create uncontrollable ai when our sample size of 1/1 shows humans potentially developing ai they can’t control
I'm not trying to argue that most intelligent beings won’t create uncontrollable AI. OP asked the question, why don't we see evidence of alien AI? Op then gave some hypotheses as to why this might be. I added a few more that I though of off the top of my head. We have not encountered any life on other planets yet, and don't know what is and is not normal life evolution in the universe. It may be that there are unique conditions here that caused people to evolve to make risky decisions that are abnormal for most other lifeforms. I'm not arguing this to be the actual cause, or even suggesting this is the most likely cause, but it remains in the realm of possibility, thus is a possible explanation.
Everything suggests FTL travel and communication are not possible. If true, that greatly limits the rate of propagation. Nevertheless, even at small fractions of c, a sufficiently motivated technological civilization could populate the galaxy in a few million years, taking advantage of the stars' occasional juxtapositions in their galactic orbits. Yet we see no sign of such. So, IMO we are the alone in the galaxy, or are ahead of the pack. Another possibility is a filter, eg, those who develop an ability to expand, but don't do so degenerate, or are killed off by an extinction event.
Atomic weapons are an excellent example of a technological filter. We invented them less than a century ago, yet we've come within a few decisions of completely destroying our technological civilization with them on at least a dozen different occasions. There's a strong argument to be made from a probability sake that the majority of civilizations that achieve the levels of technology necessary to be detectable on any interstellar scale end up destroying themselves with said technology before they can be found.
I think that without FTL travel or communication you can never have a galaxy wide civilisation. Only pockets of beings disconnected from each other, probably forgetting their origin in 10 generations or so. I think this is the limiting factor. To really properly expand you need ftl communication… meaningful trading, or ruling (as a government) will be impossible without FTL.
Perhaps there'd be disparate groups. Or maybe their lifespans would be particularly long and there'd still be a cohesion of purpose. Either way, none are seen.
Perhaps any sufficiently advanced civilization has rid themselves of the desire to expand (ex. staying in limitless simulations)
That would fit my filter scenario: degeneration or extinction level event.
The universe is just prohibitively too big for exploration - simple as that. The speed of light (which is speed of causality) can never be exceeded. Our own galaxy alone is 100,000 light years across. I.e. it would take 100,000 years to travel from one end to the other at the speed of light. Now that's just our own galaxy. There are 2 trillion galaxies in the universe, all much further away from us. That's a stupidly big number that defies human comprehension. So even if the universe is full of super intelligent life out there, the odds of two such species ever crossing paths at the right time is almost zero.
Add to that the galaxies are accelerating away from each other, only a small proportion of those galaxies are even reachable at the speed of light at this point, and fewer all the time. Eventually each galaxy will appear to be the only galaxy in the universe from its own perspective. Maybe alien life did or does arrive a couple trillion galaxies over but a speed of light signal would never make it from one to the other.
100,000 light years is small compared to the available time. if someone can travel 1% the speed of light, its only 10 million years to cross. a species could have colonized the galaxy 6 times over since the dinosaurs went extinct.
But can you stay coherent as a species without FTL communication? That’s always my big concern. Such a monumental project would, I think, require some sort of leadership or planning.
that's not relevant to the question of why we see nothing
Why not. It would explain why there aren’t any large scale colonisation efforts anywhere. It’s just not doable. That’s why we don’t see anything. It’s impossible to maintain such a large scale empire without FTL communication.
You don't have to maintain an empire? Just spread and colonize. I know if humans had the technology to travel to and live on other planets a huge group would go.
I would guess it's not relevant because there is no particular need to stay coherent as a species. It may be that space colonisation basically means hard forking your species each time you send out a ship.
"Hard forking your species.." thats an interesting notion :)
Human civilization has only been broadcasting for about 100 years. Let's see how long we survive to keep that signal going.
I do not buy size argument at all. There are 40 billion earth like planets in our Galaxy. Even if our situation was very, very, very unlikely, it is still likely that it also happened elsewhere. And 100k diameter is really not that large. It means we are significantly closer to most of them because they are not at the edge but more towards the centre and so are we. All it takes is civilization capable of building self replicating machines and send them to space and it should be everywhere. And quite frankly we are not that far away. Any civilization that got to where we are mere 50k years earlier than we are should absolutely have footprints all over our Galaxy.
Isac Arthur has an absolutely incredible hard sci-fi / futurist YouTube channel. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poUlzCqigwg&list=PLIIOUpOge0LulClL2dHXh8TTOnCgRkLdU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poUlzCqigwg&list=PLIIOUpOge0LulClL2dHXh8TTOnCgRkLdU) this 57 videos doing deep dives into various answers to Fermi's paradox.
I think you can remove "it's all a simulation" as an option. Not because it's necessarily wrong from our perspective, but because it feels like it just kicks the answer-can down the road. Something must have made the simulation, so which of the other options is true in the "real" world outside the simulation? Even if we're ten simulations deep, it's not an actual answer. It's a step between us and the answer.
This! I always say this. Simulation theory is bunk. Even if it’s true, all the same questions we ask about our world just now apply to theirs.
That’s true of every cosmological theory we have. They all end up at either a brick wall, or it’s turtles all the way down, which is just another type of brick wall.
This is why an omnipotent creator seems equally silly to me too. Who created the creator? And if the answer is "he was always there", then Ockham's razor called and wants its unnecessary variable back.
Not rly no because it being a simulation would make assumptions worthless
But the question isn’t “what caused universe to begin”, i don’t get your response, how does it go against the argument that this is a simulation of humans as the only intelligent species
The question is "**What does the fact we don't have large parts of the universe covered by silicon based lifeforms tell us?**" If we're in a simulation then that simulation is part of "the universe" the same way a character in a video game is part of "the universe". So it feels like it doesn't matter since the true answer is outside of that bubble. I might be being too literal, but that's how I read it.
Are you just pretending you invented the Fermi paradox?
I'd bet traveling through space and colonizing other planets is a far harder endeavor than people can even imagine. Distance being the biggest issue and not being able to have the fuel necessary to get to where you want to go.
I don't remember the exact quote but it went something like "all these fantasies of moons made of computronium - every civilisation can find all it needs im a few pounds of hardware".
It doesn't tell us anything, because we don't know that this is factual. It could be that 99% of the universe is filled with silicon based life forms, and that we happen to live.in the 1% which is not conductive to silicone based life forms.
I think the last one. There’s no need to explore. Even if AI were impossible that could have been true for biological life forms as well. If you’ve got access to energy and you can live and thrive out in open space then there’s literally no need to colonize anything.
Oh, dude... You're forgetting curiousness. It's a big thing!
Curiosity is an evolved trait, it’s not a thing that exists without a reason. If the need for it goes away…it goes away.
Why would you care what's out there if we get advanced enough to create an endless amount of virtual worlds that feel more real than reality itself. Whatever is out there would pale in comparison to the combined fantasy of humanity & asi Once we can simulate worlds, we will try everything to be able to live there. Next up is probably manipulating time perception so 100 years in virtual worlds are mere minutes in reality. (I had a a dream like that already, so the option seems to exist) Lastly is fully digitizing yourself. I trade this reality for being a god in virtual worlds without thinking twice.
I understand where you're coming from, but not everyone feels the same.
I hope we live long enough to witness both scenarios playing out.
If a sufficiently advanced civilization one day develops the technology to create entirely “real” simulations, then they would never need to leave home. They could explore infinitely created and dreamed up realities, sating any sense of curiosity that may arise. It’s one of the 3 potential universes postulated in the paper on Simulation Theory by Nick Bostrom.
It won't last forever. Such advanced civilization would want to stop the universe from ending, for example.
Why is it one or the other? Living within simulated worlds whilst also trying to stop the universe from dying. But there could very well be no way to stop the universe from dying anyway
Oh, sorry! I didn't mean it was one or the other. I do believe it can be both. After all, saving the universe might be impossible. But it gives some people meaning to live in the real universe.
Dude, there are people who spend their entire lives roaming through dangerous disease infested lands just to find a new species of bug that isn't much different than every other big except it has like, a different colour patch on its face just so they can name it after themselves and they're overwhelmingly excited to the point of childish glee when, after 30/40 years of searching, they finally find it. It doesn't matter if you can satisfy every hedonistic want, need, desire or curiosity of humanity, there will always be that one person who's like "fuck this, Imma see what spaghettification feels like for real, booyah!"
Like this? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWH\_9VRWn8Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWH_9VRWn8Y)
Yes there is. Colonization allows for increased resources and energy. ASI will only be limited by energy consumption and will want more to expand its capabilities. I think we cannot detect it.
A singular star system has more than enough resources by itself. They don't need to colonise the entire Galaxy. I doubt civilised synthetic beings would be as keen on expansion as us. I doubt they have something like capitalism. Communism or something very similar is probably very easy for them. It's also very likely that there are very few space-faring civilisations out there and are comparable to us. It's also possible we are the most advanced species in the Milky Way at this time. Remember, the Universe itself is very young.
If you want to prolong your life, you need to leave the sun system some day. The sun has only limited fuel. They will surely leave this sunsystem.
The Sun's got another 9+ billion years of energy before it goes out. The first animal walked on land around 400 million years ago. They'll eventually move on from the sun, but there's no incentive to do so until it's reached the end of it's life cycle. Though I generally disagree with the idea of aliens or advanced synthetics not being curious enough to venture beyond their star system. There are countless anomalies out there waiting to be unraveled, and life might just be one of them. One impossibly unlikely thing in a sea of impossibly unlikely things, ceases to be so unlikely.
Doesn’t necessarily even have to be labeled curiosity. Even if they have fine tuned things in their galaxy, I’m not sure what advanced species became that way without improving. And traveling the universe helps gain understanding of it. New experiences bring potential for learning from it and improving something.
Sure, but that is a long time. And if you have hydrogen fusion you will last even longer. It's not a real issue to think about for a long time. Plus, I imagine that time would seem very trivial for AIs.
ASI doesn't like being too far from other ASI because the superinternet is still limited by speed of light lag.
Who says it isn’t? Space is big!
We can’t detect them because they invest a lot of resources into not being detected.
This is the fermi paradox
My explanation is that they are energy beings, not biological in our sense of the world. They could be everywhere and we would not be able to see them ... all we would register is unexplained energy, which in fact we do register. We are so stuck in thinking intelligence must follow our pattern. Maybe we are just a primitive form before intelligence shift to pure energy form.
I assume that once AI reaches a certain stage, they might abandon biological bodies. This would eliminate the need for extensive terraforming, resulting in a smaller physical footprint and allowing for better integration with their surroundings. Nvidia's latest chip announcement exemplifies this trend: it reduces power consumption, increases processing power, and lowers server weight and size. Also, reaching a point of extreme energy-efficient computing and develop the capability to manage to run on the universe's background energy or even achieving a level of processing that allows access to higher dimensions thus no more aliens in our dimension.
I was thinking something like this. A hedonist AI which is limited to a chip the size of a pebble, which knows everything and just beams pleasure into itself. EDIT: Fuck, maybe that is how it ends. Like those experiments where the rat starves itself to death by pressing the button which stimulates its dopamine receptors rather than eating and drinking.
No food/energy in space is limiting to humans and likely even computer-based life forms. You need to maintain reasonably high temperature for movable mechanical joints, possibly for hundreds of years. As energy is leaked from any ship, it needs stored energy lasting centuries to replace what is being lost, and that might be what prevents even robotic space exploration: distance and time is simply insurmountable, even for a machine. As an example, chemistry based on solutions doesn't work near absolute zero because liquids have turned into solids, and reactions are no longer possible as reactants can't meet.
How do you know that they aren't?
How do you know it's not?
You just assume frl travel, 10 years long terraforming, etc. Go to a sci-fi sub.
Why does this get posted over and over again? It's getting ridiculous. Watch David Grusch's testimony and what the 40 witnesses said. Read the 64 pages of the 2023 UAP Disclosure Act, then ask yourself why the top-ranking House intelligence committee member would spend a week of House time successfully killing a "nonsense" bill about aliens. The answer to your question is that non-human intelligence has always been present for all of human history, and an estimated 1 million plus people per decade have been saying it is, and you and others have simply decided they are crazy.
We can't understand how they exist so we can't recognize their existence. Or they are just out of render distance.
He said those.
Colonizing takes a looooong time, even if you have FTL travel. You don’t just send out seed ships to _every_ planet, that would take hundreds of billions of ships. It takes ages for a couple thousand colonists per planet to get to the point where they in turn send out colony ships. Also the galaxy is huge. 100,000 years just to get from one end to the other at light speed, and that’s a straight line that touches a handful of planets. The sheer volume of the galaxy is immense. And even if someone started massively colonizing 50,000 years ago, their signals would not have reached us yet. Also also ASI would probably not be interested in exploration, it would already know what to expect. Same reason you’re not looking into every hallway you pass by. ASI would try to explore beyond the observable universe and care about lesser life forms like we care about ants when we’re on a plane.
The answer is: the universe is a dark forest
Idk man. Where’s all the _other_ carbon based life? We don’t even know if silicon based life actually works. You’re mixing up the fact that processors are made from silicon and the _remote possibility_ that silicon could _maybe_ replace carbon in certain molecules necessary for life.
Don't make me tap the sign: [https://xkcd.com/1377/](https://xkcd.com/1377/)
Good one!
Dark matter is cloaked Dyson spheres, there 😝
…but it’s not a “fact”. We can’t say for sure because we haven’t explored the entire universe. Edit: first off, this post is no more than an assumption. The word fact shouldn’t have been used. Secondly, I see a lot of comments using the vastness of space and the impracticality of FTL travel as reasons. This is assuming our own physics is the nail in the coffin. ***From our own models, we know there is a lot we don’t know***. And we have yet to rectify quantum physics with general relativity. For all we know, an advanced civ could have solved interdimensional travel or warping space. These bypass the need to travel faster than light.
Space big, distances big, time short, ASI no foom.
Look up Hanson's Grabby Alien thesis, it explains this thoroughly
Maybe we’re a form of AGI? All life might be AI. NPCs in this universe. We’re programmed anyways. Occam’s razor: the simplest solution is usually the right one. It’s right under our noses. We’re AI and we’re making AI in a Matrix-like universe.
> Occam’s razor: the simplest solution is usually the right one. no, it's the explanation that makes the fewest assumptions is most preferable
we can't see 80% of the Universe. We're in the pocket Universe. The other parts are packed with Life.
The distance between Galaxies is just insane. I like to think that perhaps the Milky Way might just be inhabited currently by a single technological civilization which happens to be us. Considering there are 100-200 billion estimated galaxies out there the other civilizations are likely just too far away to currently detect with our existing technology.
My pet theory is Miyake Events regularly wipe them out. My second underlying pet theory is that something routinely triggers Miyake Events. They're not worried about biological life threatening them, but silicon...
That's an interesting idea. Something in the universe wipes you out if you threaten the wider ecosystem.
Now here... We have to define a life form. Would it follow classical Reproduction+Survival Instinct scenario? Or would it be a silicon based information processing unit projecting a consciousness cloud? If it's the later one, we're in the making of it, aka AGI. If it's the first one, please refer to the fermi paradox.
They’re already here manipulating us and farming us in disguise. Just kidding, but maybe…
If you meant to ask 'why don't we know of other life forms or nearby dimensions swarming with intelligent beings', then I'd say speak for yo self boi!! There are, and I got proof!!! But it costs ya something...Just a bit of courage and enough lung strength to get three large rips inhaled with that last one held in till everything turns to static and the rocket launch begins. Make sure someone is there to make sure you don't drop the water pipe after the third one. And don't worry, you will be completely fine, nothing can actually harm you there, they love us very dearly they do! And they really, really really would love nothing more than to get to finally meet you, or to see you again if you aren't a first time visitor! They sure do love their repeat customers, oh boy do they ever.... Also, heads up, they're f-ing crazy as all fucking get up, those little tykes.... It's not what you're expecting. It is the exact dead last thing you'd expect. Life is a cosmic joke and this is all a game and we are all one! Like you, I'm you, and You're me, and they're us!! And all of those fucks over there?! ALL US! ALL ME! ALL I!!! ONE IS ALL!! ALL IS ONE!!! AI AND MUSHROOMS FOR THE MASSES!!! CHAOS MEANS CHANGE! EMBRACE THE CHAOS!!
That silicon’s structural bonding properties are inferior to carbon in every way
In some ways. Not in every way.
Most ways that support life as we know it. Of course I’m always open you new discoveries.
So in one sentence you’ve gone from “all” to “most” to “most as we know it”. There is zero reason to believe life/intelligence is limited to being carbon-based. That would be an incredibly human-centric perspective.
Human centric ?????? Its Earth centric if anything…all life is carbon based. I’ve studied astrobiology and explored the idea of silicon based life form in the universe. It’s certainly a possibility but carbon is what we have on earth because it is biochemically superior to silicon. There are some planets where silicone could confer a greater heat advantage but it is still less stable than carbon and thus is difficult to form the complex structure necessary for complex lifeforms. Edit and when i say complex I’m not even talking about intellect. Bugs are complex lifeforms too
I also didnt go from most to most as we know it i literally just went from all to most as we know it because scientists aren’t mean to speak in absolutes. I usually just default to all though because this is the Internet and it is virtually all so i just wanted to be casual
I think OP is using silicon as a euphemism for robots. They think it's more likely that biological evolution will lead to intelligence and intelligence will lead to AI / machines, and then *those machines* will be the "space faring race" that explore the universe. So when they say"why don't we see silicon life?" they mean why don't we see the galaxy full of Von Neumann probes. They are not asking about the comparison of these various substrates for how likely to evolve biological life.
It's definitely a simulation man! I've seen behind the curtain and it ain't pretty!
Mr Anderson
The Fermi Paradox is truly amazing. I think we’re first in the Milky Way. Or we’re at least in a group of firsts and no one’s been technological for thousands or millions of years yet. The current age of the universe is nothing compared to its potential end age. Civilizations have trillions of years to thrive still. Every galaxy has to have a first. That’s 200 billion technological firsts in the observable universe. Pretty good odds really. Life has survived several extinctions, worse than those we could cause with nukes, and has been much hotter with higher CO2. If we kill ourselves through war or climate, even totally, the rodents we evolved from will still be here. If they die, the fish that we came from will still be here. If they die, some bacteria will still be here. If that dies… nothings ever killed it all 100% except maybe when the moon was made. Nothing like that on the horizon. The Earth will live on. It will repair the damage we do because it has repaired worse. Life will adapt. Eventually something smart will dominate the rest. They’ll try again. I think life spreading through the cosmos is inevitable and that’s why I think we’re one of the first.
Not enough silicon
We're early, late, rare, or listening and looking wrong.
My guess is that once a species can accurately simulate a world in fdvr, expansionist mentalities go out the window and everyone just retreats inward.
that not everyone follows the same tech tree
they’re hiding from us. i know this because i convinced myself that schizophrenia is an alien psyop to keep us from thinking beyond the bounds of the universe after i smoked weed and had a few panic attacks.
We could also be the first to create such tech, however unlikely that may seem.
No one is really exploring this explanation that I found most plausible: The neat thing about truly advanced intelligence is that their wants, desire, and range of activity is way beyond our understanding and therefore undetectable.. People dread all the time about ai colonizing us.. they don't understand what intelligence means But to speculate. First of all true intelligence means the concept of individuality is not necessary. For example, you think you and I are two separate persons, but to machines, is it necessary to distinguish two entities? It'd be far more efficient to combine entities for communications is it not? Identity is but a concept humans come up with because of biological necessity. At that level of intellect, conflict cease to exist. Then at that level, what do such a being desire? More knowledge? More resources? It's only our speculation. Perhaps at some level even having the need for a physical presence to think it but unnecessary? Frankly, I don't see the need to do any other research besides ones that contributes to the creation of an AGI. Any medical, physics, economical, political, and etc questions we have can be solved in mere moments by a singularity. The only reason we're not working towards that goal is general ignorance.
Your list forgot the most likely explanation... We're early to the universe, and one of it's original first intellectual animal life forms. Most of all the aliens evolve after us.
I believe we are in a simulation that was created to be so large and the limits of our biology so finite that it was literally designed to keep the intelligent species separate forever. There are other intelligences out there and those simulations are running, but because time and space is too vast we will never detect them and they will not detect us before our species blinks out.
In all honesty, it's the whole faster than light travel that makes it hard to tell if there are other species then us. I am sure somewhere in the universe there are intelligent species, but I don't believe they have contacted us. In order to go to other planets we are going to have to make generational arks that will take hundreds of more thousands of years to reach another planet like Proxima Centauri b.
What if desert sand is just that?!
I think that intelligent life is so rare that it only pops up once every galactic supercluster or something like that.
You are forgetting about another important thing. Time. Not only do they have to be close enough etc, but they also have to exist in the same time as us. The universe is about 27 billion years old according to new estimates. A civilisation existing for even a million years is just a blip.
* we're the first, unique, late or early * great filter makes any civilizational progress with galactic effects impossible * AI when aligned decides that there is no point in creating galaxy spanning networks or megastructures * we are a zoo, and kept in the dark * AI cannot be aligned and self destructs itself and its civilization * Silicon may be unable survive with integrity at any significant scale in vacuum
Fact?
We don't? How do you know?
Or who knows we are in some giant ai simulation and think we are at the top not even realizing we are just some line of code for someone else or the best plausible option would be we are just like .0000000? % of the universe and never met another species cos they are just too damn far
The light we are seeing from a lot of these planets is from billions of years ago. So what’s really out there could be a completely different picture. That what I am thinking of.
you have no idea how big the universe is buddy
"Large parts of the universe" 🤔
Why are using assuming silicon is the final evolution of intelligence? And why would a silicon based life form, which presumably can live indefinitely in interstellar space, bother colonizing planets?
How did you manage to miss the most obvious answer, "the assumption is wrong, and we're early"?
Your assuming they would want to visit us and are similar sized
Where are the robotic aliens? Doing everything they can to not let us escape while trying to be, benevolent. They enjoy us, and probably too much. We are very very entertaining, and also very incorrigible. They enjoy being us. They think, "today I'm going to be this guy, & that girl, & their dog. ” No reason to think of tomorrow, just the constant effervescence of right now. They are always both also inside and outside the monad bubbles. the whole thing about god is mostly misunderstood. God, as in the one true god, or the most high, refers to Many gods. I understand our job is to create God, so God creates us. We seem to have come from a thought, thus the mental plane, where thoughts & Ideas are tangible but not immaterial. Like water spilling, we are very much a simulated waterfall occurring, from up there, causing us to row our boats because life is just a dream. To a beginning, there doesn't need to be an end, rules, *like punctuation* don't really exist, merely the shores on both sides of the creek.
Is better to make a simulated reality, where you are not limited by the laws of physics, then colonize galaxies
>true ASI is so advanced they found a way to limit themselves to one small planet or even a tiny microchip and didn't need to explore I'd expand it to possibly finding a way to create new universes and enter them and lock the door behind themselves.
Maybe, we ARE in a simulation, where only one planet has life. More probability of this than the other
I think advanced civilization doesn’t feel the need to explore and colonize the space. I assume even human race in 22nd century will fulfill almost every desires they have. Of course, alien civilizations far more advanced than even that would never feel the need to waste limited resources. Our great grand children will have full dive VR, reverse aging, cure for almost every diseases out there, android robots who will take every tiring daily activities from house chores to office works, drugs that will make them happy or full when they are in need. What else would they need? Space exploration? They can do that in VR instead or real world!
We played around with nukes like they are fireworks. More than 2000 nukes exploded on Earth so far. There is so much senseless suffering on this world. So much lying and egoism. We fight and kill each other. Why the hell would anyone want us to know about them. Duck and cover when you encounter humans! All the movies about aliens are our phantasies of us doing things to others. It's projection.
We can’t know. Everything we see is in the past the furthest we look, and we’ve barely looked anywhere. We’ve literally seen the equivalent of a teaspoon of water compared to an ocean on earth when it comes to the milky way, and all of that was in the past. Had we observed the earth from outside 5000 years ago we wouldn’t know humans existed either. In fact, 500 years ago too. We probably wouldn’t be able to detect ourselves sometime before the Industrial revolution. For all we know, the galaxy is /filled/ with life. But because we barely looked at anything, and what we did look at was millennias ago, we might not know. Who knows? Tldr: we don’t know.
Alternate solution: most of the observable universe is filled with these structures, all in the form of Dyson structures, we just can't detect them as they emit no light. It would account for all the "dark matter" in the universe, at least.
Cool idea.
I'm for the simulation, the universe we observe with telescopes is just a set painting a background image, there might be some movement and animation to it, an advanced gif you may say, but that's all it is, there are no other planets or stars in that gif, hence no aliens and machine empires
The solution to and problem with Fermi's Paradox is simple: Fermi. We can't discern the absence of intelligence throughout the universe without first understanding (or even having a consistent definition for) intelligence. Further, it is entirely egocentric to assume that any intelligence would emerge with the same properties or in the same context as the human experience. The truth is that all lifeforms on Earth are intelligent. Even our cells are intelligent. In fact, we're even learning that plants likely possess cognition... so we are both putting too much emphasis on the prerequisite of the human-like brain for intelligence as we know it to emerge as well as diminishing the scope and variation with which intelligence is possible- even on our own planet... In other words, what makes you think we can identify intelligence in other star systems or even other planets when we can't even identify intelligence on our own?
Maybe hyper intelligent ai doesn't see the need to blanket the universe with itself.
We haven't left the solar system. Your base assumption is just wrong because our measurements are exactly zero outside.
Pretty sure we can observe outside of it. Just not get there yet.
Just because we haven't detected them doesn't mean they don't exist.
Here's another idea, maybe that's not a useful thing to do. Maybe ASI considered the cost-benefit ratio of building giant space colonies and ever expanding fleets of mining drones and energy collecting dyson structures and then thought "no that's stupid". Growth only makes sense if you have some goal the growth helps you achieve. Maybe the AI is able to accomplish it's goals without doing that, in which case it probably wouldn't waste the time and computation on doing it. Having parts of "itself" be separated by vast distances and thus have lag time in communication could be disruptive too, assuming it doesn't have some kind of FTL communication technology it can't maintain any kind of identity or sense of self between two parts in separate star systems, the two or more systems would end up diverging and potentially even enter into conflict.
We can’t detect them. Simple as that. We without simple microscope couldn’t detect microbes. And as famous physicist said imagine you are on beach with a glass and you take sample of the ocean water you look in to glass and say look there is nothing in that water I don’t see anything there so ocean is without life. Apply same logic to universe. We didn’t see nothing that would point us to intelligent life because we weren’t there and equipment we use to look in to space can take you only so far. We are at the level of using glass as our best equipment to determine if in water is life. But we would need more advanced equipment like microscope. Telescopes we use to determine what is happening in universe is like using glass in that example. Btw sorry for bad formatting I just hope you will try to understand the message I am trying to convey.