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[Scoops Novel]

Share your opinions.

My take:

If any AI is a potential threat to the galaxy...

then you would naturally prevent all attempts at making it. Even if you have your own god-tier AI, because you can't know if it will find a different development path. IMO.

That no one's stopping us from developing ours says a lot.

And yet our galaxy only shows rich prospects for life.

It's quite possible that we we're lucky enough to be born ahead of any Von Neumann probe project, but within a window that provides for other civilizations who are simply yet to reach us.

[NJW2000]

I mean, that's just one standard take with some stuff specifically about AI thrown in.

And when it comes to aliens, I wouldn't assume that we'd be able to meaningfully distinguish between artificial and non-artificial anything... or be certain that we're dealing with an intelligence, for that matter.

Minus the AI stuff, don't particularly disagree... I wouldn't be suprised if a handful of relativistic buckshot shattered the solar system sometime soon.

Because I'd be dead.

[Scoops Novel]

Let me just add on to my first point, by way of counterpoint.

Counterpoint:

A successful species realizes AI development spells likely disaster and finds a way to disrupt the process. They stick to the limits of biology.

Furthermore:

A species that survives on a long enough timescale (a reasonable assumption, as this is what species do) eyes the entropy of the universe as the ultimate problem. A problem they can't use AI to solve - nor interact with someone else's, as their galaxy would probably already have been wrecked by it.

They must rely on biological intelligences to solve the problem instead, within certain bounds of intelligence that don't ruin their civilization on contact. Augmenting the intelligence of their own species rapidly has the same risks as AI.

The average successful species is highly motivated to seek out alien civilizations, carefully. As either coworkers or risks to control. Not only this, it is motivated to maximize the number of alien civilizations and encourage as much intellectual range as possible.

What does contact between cultures breed? Uniformity.

A sufficiently advanced civilization has every reason to impose a galactic blackout. To mask themselves and others, to maximize diversity and to save power...

It could be that our current tech level is simply considered an important part of the development process. If we don’t figure it out ourselves, they step in.

[MrRoboto75]

Why would an alien race want to deal with humans?  They're disgusting and total assholes.

[Criptfeind]

My opinion is probably the boring one of "not enough data". There's as many opinions on where life in the universe is and what it is doing as there's people that have thought about the question, ranging from the fantastical to the mundane, and most generally fall into the category of "seems a bit flawed, but we don't really have enough info to even start to tell how likely or unlikely something is." The one I personally believe to be most likely is simply that (intelligent technological spacefaring) life is rare enough that we haven't met any aliens because either none exist (assuming the universe isn't infinite) or none are close enough to have met us yet, and possibly (perhaps even probably) will never meet them because of distance. Ultimately though we don't even have the data to make accurate predictions about how rare life is, so we can't even start to calculate if it's actually likely we haven't met any aliens yet, making the rare earth/life/technology hypothesis ultimately untestable. At least until we gain a much greater understanding of how life is made and the make up of the planets of the universe. That said, it still seems most feasible to me because not are pretty much all other theories (at best) untestable as well, but also make further assumptions and have other possible flaws with them. For instance, there's a lot of assumptions and possible issues with Zoo hypothesis where you not only need to posit that aliens exist, but you also have to make assumptions about the technological feasibility of containment and isolation as well as the sociological assumptions about why aliens would do this in the first place. These assumptions don't make the theory impossible, they possibly don't make it unlikely (we usually don't have enough info to even go that far) but they are simply more assumptions and thus a more complicated theory.

Some more specific comments on the zoo hypothesis (since I figure I'd better actually try to engage instead of pissing into the void.)

If any AI is a potential threat to the galaxy...

then you would naturally prevent all attempts at making it. Even if you have your own god-tier AI, because you can't know if it will find a different development path. IMO.

I'm not sure this 100% follows. AI isn't going to be any more of a threat to the "galaxy" than a natural intelligence. It'd simply be another form of life, doing what life does, and the galaxy and universe won't care. Now, it could be a huge threat to other intelligence, but of course, other intelligence are going to be a huge threat to each other anyway, so it doesn't seem like AI is going to be too special in that regard. If non organic intelligence proves both vastly superior to organic intelligence and unable to co-exist, it might make sense for a society to replace itself (or ascend itself, depending on your point of view) with a successor society it creates out of non organic intelligence specifically to solve the problem of the potential for an outside non organic intelligence destroying their society utterly.

And yet our galaxy only shows rich prospects for life.

We really don't have the information to make such statements with any certainty yet, but from we're sitting, there's 1 planet in this galaxy with life that we know of. So really it doesn't look rich.

It's quite possible that we we're lucky enough to be born ahead of any Von Neumann probe project, but within a window that provides for other civilizations who are simply yet to reach us.

This specifically seems extremely unlikely given the scale of time of the age galaxy. It'd be incredibly (un)lucky for us if life was rare enough that none arose for the last 13 billion years but then we showed up just a fraction of a moment (in galactic scales) behind some other intelligence. Unless there's some specific thing that made intelligent technological spacefaring life vastly more likely in the last million years, but I don't think there's any possible explanation for that.

And when it comes to aliens, I wouldn't assume that we'd be able to meaningfully distinguish between artificial and non-artificial anything... or be certain that we're dealing with an intelligence, for that matter.

This is certainly an interesting one to think about, aliens so alien to us that we can't even recognize them. However, it strains the imagination a bit to imagine what they could actually be. Like... There's really no way an intellect could mistake US as natural. It'd be incredibly obvious with even cursory understanding of basically anything that life at least exists on earth, and it'd be very easy to see our intelligence. It feels like unless we're missing out on entire realms of being that alien to the point of being unrecognizable aliens (intelligent technological ones at least) is more a fantastical thing then a realistic thing. Although of course, like everything on this topic, we can't say anything definitively. Maybe it's a lot easier then I give it credence for

The average successful species is highly motivated to seek out alien civilizations, carefully. As either coworkers or risks to control. Not only this, it is motivated to maximize the number of alien civilizations and encourage as much intellectual range as possible.

What does contact between cultures breed? Uniformity.

A sufficiently advanced civilization has every reason to impose a galactic blackout. To mask themselves and others, to maximize diversity and to save power...

I am skeptical of this as well. As it seems like a reach to assume that alien intelligence have inherent value for technological progress, this after all isn't a 4x game, with mutually exclusive tech choices. It's hard to imagine that any difference in psychology would give rise to an advantage that be able to compete with millions or billions of years of research. And, frankly, if you're afraid of AI taking out your society, that probably implies a level of caution that would also extend that fear to other intelligence outside of your society, and it seems unlikely that you'd want others to grow outside of your society (rightfully or not). And, if you're not afraid of that, or think you have the capability to control it, and there is some value in alien intelligence, you can simply colonize the galaxy and then wait a couple of million or billion years. All the daughter societies created by your colonization will probably then be as alien to you as any aliens from another planet.

Edit: For some reason I forgot to throw in my general overview of what I think zoo hypothesis greatest flaw is, which is simply the scale of time/size in the universe (tbf, this is pretty much the greatest flaw of any solution to the Fermi Paradox.) Specifically it needs to be enforced for billions of years? In this specific version non organic intelligence is apparently enough to defeat an already secured organic intelligence society, but at the same time they are able to stop that from happening for billions of years without resorting to wiping out any possible seeds for it? It's powerful enough that they can't use it themselves, but no break away fraction of their society uses it overtly or secretly to gain an edge against their fellows for, once again, millions or billions of years? If they are thinking of entropy they have to enforce this for now hundreds of TRILLIONS of years? How would they even enforce it on far away galaxies that are too far for them to have reached but still within their hubble volume? This seems hard to swallow as a likely path, although as always I'll say we lack the information to make a true determination of how reasonable it is.

[MaxTheFox]

What Criptfiend said.

I think more likely than not, we just haven't run into any evidence of alien activity yet. Space is big and signals fade quickly. They wouldn't see us, we wouldn't see them.

I mean, that's just one standard take with some stuff specifically about AI thrown in.

And when it comes to aliens, I wouldn't assume that we'd be able to meaningfully distinguish between artificial and non-artificial anything... or be certain that we're dealing with an intelligence, for that matter.

Minus the AI stuff, don't particularly disagree... I wouldn't be suprised if a handful of relativistic buckshot shattered the solar system sometime soon.

Because I'd be dead.

I mean, that's just one standard take with some stuff specifically about AI thrown in.

And when it comes to aliens, I wouldn't assume that we'd be able to meaningfully distinguish between artificial and non-artificial anything... or be certain that we're dealing with an intelligence, for that matter.

Minus the AI stuff, don't particularly disagree... I wouldn't be suprised if a handful of relativistic buckshot shattered the solar system sometime soon.

Because I'd be dead.

1. Killshots are a dumb idea because they are far too risky. By the time it reaches your target, they are likely to have other colonies and technology to launch their own killshot. It's mutually-assured destruction.
2. I wouldn't expect aliens to be particularly similar to Earth life, but some things are just inherent to life. If anything, we definitely would recognize their constructions as artificial.

[Great Order]

The universe is big. Like, stupidly big. This doesn't just apply to space but time as well, there's 13.8 billions years of history in the universe. Obviously life couldn't exist for a good chunk of that just because there weren't enough non-hydrogen/helium elements at first, and then evolution needs time to get anywhere.

Now lets assume that civilisation has a half life before something happens. It collapses, permanently turns inwards because everyone uploads to an artificial paradise, robots turn everyone into paperclips, whatever.

Even if the half-life of a civilisation is in the hundreds of thousands of years, there's loads of time for any nearby civilisations to disappear before we appeared. We're just too distant from any other civilisations that are concurrent with us, and we're too far temporally removed from any civilisations that were/will be nearby.

Of course, another solution is that we're among the first civilisations to appear.

[King Zultan]

What if the reason we've never seen any aliens is because they looked at what was going on in Earth and decided that we all sucked and didn't want anything to do us?

[wierd]

I prefer my view:

We are looking for the wrong things.  (more accurately, what we are able to look at gets attenuated too much to be useful, unless the aliens are literally burning up whole goddamn suns to try and talk to us.)


Any civilization that is as advanced as we are would have their radio frequency emissions attenuated after just a short (in terms of interstellar distance) radius around their planetary system, simply because of the inverse cube law.   It would become just a bath of random chaotic signals intermixed with the much louder signals produced by quasars, feeding black holes, magnetar pairs, neutron star binaries, et al.

Unless they were absurdly close to us, such as in the Alpha Centauri system, we would never be able to communicate with them using the technology we currently possess.  James Webb is a fabulous telescope, and has very good IR sensing capabilities, but is not sufficiently large of an aperture to be able to directly scan distant star systems in the manner required to detect thermal signatures from alien species' industrial operations.   We would need to create an entire constellation of Webb Telescopes at the Lagrangian point, and use them as a large array telescope to have any chance of it.

So, what about hyper advanced aliens?

Our very limited gravitational telescope tech has shown there to be a very small, but important incongruity between the speed of Gwaves and radio waves through space.  This is because space is not empty: There is a very fine soup of energetic particles all suffusing it, which slow down EM radiation, but not gravitational waves.  As such, Gwaves arrive first, and unless they interact with a very large gravitating body, they do not get attenuated by that 'stuff' in the way.  This means that a gravitational telescope array would permit FAAAAAAR more clear and accurate scans of distant systems, especially when combined with the fact that Gwaves lose energy in the inverse square relationship, not inverse cube, like with EM.

Assuming a civilization could produce high intensity, highly directional gravitational waves, they would be a FAR superior carrier for interstellar communication than EM radiation. Such as for instance, a GASER Such communication would require precision calculation of time dilation effects between source and destination, and would have to be aimed into regions of space into which the target "Will pass at the time the wave arrives", rather than simply pointing at the target. It would have far higher fidelity than EM communication, due to the lack of attenuation by intervening matter, and the order of magnitude less energy loss over distance due to the inverse square holding sway.  It would however, still be effectively "Light speed" communication.

It is important to stress that until the last decade or so, Gravitational Waves were considered "Theoretical", and we had no means of accurately detecting them.  Our best instrument, LIGO, is both massive, and low resolution. (It is essentially "A single pixel" sized sensing device.) Should an alien civilization be encoding data in G waves, we would likely not be able to tease it out unless they were sending it as morse code.  This is not very efficient as a transport; Polarization based communication stratagems normally used on laser optical communication would apply to gravity wave based communication as well (since gravitational waves exhibit polarization), and would permit many orders of magnitude greater density to be transmitted and received, assuming suitable sensors and broadcast equipment.

It is quite possible that the reason we don't see any aliens, is thus:

1) The thing we are able to search for gets turned into a smear of EM radiation that we can't discern from the background.
2) The thing we might be able to search for eventually, and that appears to be a better candidate for interstellar comms, we currently lack the resolution to receive with enough fidelity to tease out intelligent messages.
3) Due to the need for the communication to be directional, we would need to be "Very lucky" to be in exactly the right place and the right time, to intercept a transmission not meant for us, should we have the technology to collect and analyze gwave data at sufficient fidelity.

Assuming that all advanced intelligence must be hobbled by EM communication, like we are, is hubris.
Assuming that just because we cannot detect them, they must not exist, is likewise-- pure hubris.

[Quarque]

Note that the Fermi paradox is not "why are we not seeing Aliens?".
The Fermi paradox is: "If aliens have had hundreds of millions of years to spread, why aren't they here yet?"

The answer basically has to be a variant of one of these:

• they're here, but they stay quiet / only allow themselves to be photographed in blurred images
• interstellar travel is too hard / impossible
• all civilizations like ours kill themselves with nukes once they reach that level of technology
• Life is extremely rare / unique within the galaxy
• Intelligent life is extremely rare / unique within the galaxy

And we simply do not know which of these it is. There are convincing arguments (but no hard evidence) for each of these answers.

[MaxTheFox]

In my hard SF setting, the solution is "civilizations kill themselves and each other some thousands of years after attaining interstellar travel, and the new cycle has just started". Which is, of course, a narrative contrivance due to FTL being a thing in the setting while we don't have any evidence for it being feasible to attain (even via Alcubierrie drives etc). But this conversation reminded me of that.

[wierd]

Note that the Fermi paradox is not "why are we not seeing Aliens?".
The Fermi paradox is: "If aliens have had hundreds of millions of years to spread, why aren't they here yet?"

The answer basically has to be a variant of one of these:

• they're here, but they stay quiet / only allow themselves to be photographed in blurred images
• interstellar travel is too hard / impossible
• all civilizations like ours kill themselves with nukes once they reach that level of technology
• Life is extremely rare / unique within the galaxy
• Intelligent life is extremely rare / unique within the galaxy

And we simply do not know which of these it is. There are convincing arguments (but no hard evidence) for each of these answers.

No, it's literally "Where is everyone?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Consider: 

We cannot effectively tell if a planet is even a planet outside our solar system unless it transits its star.
Even then, being able to directly measure its atmosphere is only possible based on a number of assumptions about its parent star, and its light absorption profile.
Our most HotShit telescope was able to do this for a nearby transiting planet, but that's the limit of what it was able to accomplish-- we cannot tell if the planet has abnormal heat signatures. We cannot tell if the planet's atmosphere is artificially polluted or not-- etc.  In short, we cannot determine if the planet has a civilization on it or not.


If we assume space travel is expensive (which is likely), and that interstellar comms are expensive (energy being blasted out into space is not free yo), combined with the above musings about gravity based comms being more efficient/desirable, along with EM comms being unable to overcome inherent difficulties with traversing the interstellar medium with sufficient fidelity-- It totally DOES become "We cannot detect them!"

In order for aliens to come visit us, we have to be interesting in some way-- Space travel being expensive--  If they cannot see us (because of our shitty EM based comms), then they have no reason to visit. If our planet is not in an orbital plane that is directly in the same plane of ecliptic as theirs, our planet won't appear to transit our star: They might not even see there is a planet at all here.

The notion that aliens should have already been here is hubris; It requires a level of energy and information gathering capability that prevailing physics says is not achievable.

Some pundits preen and crow that a species capable of interstellar colonization should have been able to spread through the stars by now.  I will give a dashing blow to that idea:
We have been able to go to the moon for greater than 60 years, but have elected to not do so, because of the high cost of doing so, the low perceived rewards of doing so, the greater opportunities presented by spending those resources on more terrestrial projects, and a general desire by politicians to stay popular, and in power.  If such things are also true of other species, the theoretical capacity to colonize the galaxy has no bearing on the actual impetus to do so.  Much like our theoretical ability to colonize our solar system has had no actual bearing on the impetus for our species to do so.

Again, the notion of "we cant see them! THEY MUST NOT EXIST!!" relies on the assumption that the methods we use to detect them, and the methods we use to communicate, are conserved with them.  As I pointed out, this need not be the case, and that advanced aliens are quite likely to have abandoned EM based communications and scanning, due to the issues I cited--- We are not emitting what they are looking for, and we are not looking for what they are emitting.  We dont see each other, and neither of us has the resources to just pick a direction and "Just see what we find there."

[Scoops Novel]

Space is big

Cryptfiend, you ask why these ridiculous edge cases would exist. There's your answer. It just seems that without ridiculous edge cases the default answer is "stomped by AI." You ask why it would be a threat: even if you build your own to protect against someone else's, you're by definition building it "blind". You can't know what way it should develop itself at the level of the universe and intelligence it's operating at; when something moving individual quarks around like gears, for example, the builder species has no clue what it "should" do. It's all the AI; and it's method is not guaranteed to be perfect.

Simple example: there's a million ways to build a house on a open plain. A ant doesn't grasp this; a human does grasp this, but by no means understands it. It's no different with AI; which is stepping onto a new, wide open plain of the universe and "deciding" what house to build, with information that is not necessarily perfect.

Someone builds a different AI, it's possible they could lap yours at random simply by happening to build a better house.

(if) there is some value in alien intelligence, you can simply colonize the galaxy and then wait a couple of million or billion years. All the daughter societies created by your colonization will probably then be as alien to you as any aliens from another planet.

You want the aliens to be as alien as possible, so the intelligence is as varied as possible. You'd recognize Entropy is a hard problem; so you'd be willing to take the risk.

There's always going to be some fucking sentient species that is actually sane, weird
and lucky enough to survive at a high tech level over a long period. And to them, at a certain point it's just another long-term problem.

I admit, it's a leap. But if disrupting yourself out of AI permanently is doable... it begs the question, because it seems to me the most likely way to do that is by giving the actual species on a individual level so much power they can cock-block themselves indefinitely.

[MaxTheFox]

1. I think you're overhyping AI.
2. You are underestimating the timescales involved with regards to heat death. It goes past "long-term problem" and into "practical eternity".

[Criptfeind]

We are looking for the wrong things. 

Assuming that all advanced intelligence must be hobbled by EM communication, like we are, is hubris.
Assuming that just because we cannot detect them, they must not exist, is likewise-- pure hubris.

This is in essence a specific subset of the (intelligent technological spacefaring) life is rare hypothesis, saying that intelligent and technological life isn't rare, but specifically spacefaring is rare. Of course we couldn't detect a civilization equivalent to our own even if it was relatively close by (on the galactic scale) so if we posit that we've reached the apex of technological development in the field of space travel and the issues with it will not or can not be solved, as well as other technologies that would make communication with primiative cultures easier (and since without spare travel those tend to be a lot more sci-fi that's a perfectly fine assumption to make) and thus every civilization is stuck mostly on their planet with an extremely minor orbital presence, it presents a neat answer to the Fermi "paradox". Funny thing is this likely holds true whether or not gasers are possible and practical, or if the opposite was the case, and it was technologically feasible for a civilization to colonize the galaxy, gasers also probably wouldn't matter . It's another one of those things where the scale of the age of the universe makes the question a bit moot.

This is a pretty pessimistic viewpoint imo, since it implies humanity is just going to limp along on earth until we eventually wipe ourselves out or get got by some disaster. That doesn't mean it's unlikely (frankly, I'd agree that seems like the most likely case) but it is sad.

Now lets assume that civilisation has a half life before something happens. It collapses, permanently turns inwards because everyone uploads to an artificial paradise, robots turn everyone into paperclips, whatever.

Even if the half-life of a civilisation is in the hundreds of thousands of years, there's loads of time for any nearby civilisations to disappear before we appeared. We're just too distant from any other civilisations that are concurrent with us, and we're too far temporally removed from any civilisations that were/will be nearby.

In my hard SF setting, the solution is "civilizations kill themselves and each other some thousands of years after attaining interstellar travel, and the new cycle has just started". Which is, of course, a narrative contrivance due to FTL being a thing in the setting while we don't have any evidence for it being feasible to attain (even via Alcubierrie drives etc). But this conversation reminded me of that.

For sure cyclical galactic apocalypses are a common answer in science fiction, and it's not hard to see why given that it gives our main characters an ancient graveyard of a galaxy to loot for sufficiently advanced technology and often times even a problem for them to solve.

That said, I think it seems a bit less likely, once a civilization has spread itself to multiple star systems. Consider that in our world civilizations "collapsing" only very very rarely means that an area becomes devoid of people, more often then not it simply is the birth of a new civilization in it's place. Really only natural disasters or complete ecological devastation leads to complete depopulation, and once a civilization is able to colonize other star systems, there's not really any natural disasters left that can wipe them out, and they can simply expand ahead of their own wave of resource exhaustion, if that is an issue. So you're limited to man made apocalypses at that point. To talk about the ones that Great order brought up, a civilization turning in on itself for uploading has two issues as an answer to the "paradox" first is that it requires that every member of that civilization takes part in the upload, that there's no Amish equivalent that doesn't do this and instead keeps expanding, if there is, then it doesn't really matter how small this subculture is, if they keep expanding they'll eventually overtake the old culture relatively rapidly. And it becomes difficult to enforce such a choice on all of society if that society has started to spread to multiple stars. The second and even bigger issue for that as an answer is that even uploaded simulated minds still are dependent on the outside universe for upkeep, expansion, and security. It doesn't answer why they haven't consumed the galaxy to create more server banks and energy collectors. Why they don't destroy or contact us on purpose or on accident. The same goes for robots turning everyone into paper clips, why would a paper clip maximizer stop at just it's parent civilization instead of expanding until the whole galaxy is paper clips?

Now, all that is NOT to say that it's impossible, in fact, it's not even hard to imagine situations that would stop the expansion of a culture, but when you look at what it would actually take, then you realize that this doesn't just apply to a single culture, but every single one that appears in the galaxy (they ALL uploaded themselves and are okay staying with only a few suns of server space and not dealing with other civilizations appearing and possibly threatening them? They ALL got wiped out by machines that have the right settings to stop when they have wiped out their parent civilization and not keep going?) you see that this, although certainly possible, does start to seem slightly more of a reach. Although I mean, once again, not enough data lol, it could be possible. Or even it could be that there's some combination of factors, like maybe life is super rare, but not so rare that we shouldn't have seen it yet, it popped up twice before, but one form is now just a mega computer around their home sun and another got turned into paper clips, that sorta thing is perfectly plausible as well.

Cryptfiend, you ask why these ridiculous edge cases would exist. There's your answer. It just seems that without ridiculous edge cases the default answer is "stomped by AI." You ask why it would be a threat: even if you build your own to protect against someone else's, you're by definition building it "blind". You can't know what way it should develop itself at the level of the universe and intelligence it's operating at; when something moving individual quarks around like gears, for example, the builder species has no clue what it "should" do. It's all the AI; and it's method is not guaranteed to be perfect.

I'm sorry, I can't parse what you're actually saying here. What ridiculous edge cases are you talking about? And for the rest... I just don't really get what you're saying.

Over all though, I want you to keep in mind, I was just pointing out potential flaws or areas that this theory needed to reach further and make assumptions for it to work. I've said it once and I'll say it a million times, we don't have the data to make any determination of what's actually more or less likely. I just personally like less complicated theories that make less assumptions, so that what I believe in. But it doesn't really matter, and there's no like, solid ground here for any belief. So even when I'm poking holes in theory, that doesn't mean I'm saying the theory is impossible or that those holes need to be filled (but it's nice if they are of course) just that it makes it, in my view, less likely, but not in a quantitative way.