The Fermi Paradox -- Where is everybody?

It doesn't really take any super long term planning if you get an energy based propellant free engine design going. Distances start to even out where there's not much difference in 100 light years and crossing the entire galaxy. Just need to build big and stack alot of ice at the front.

Last time I looked at the numbers I think you could cross the entire galaxy in 22 years of subjective time if you could maintain a 1G accel. It is a big if though, relative mass increases near C, and even dust grains at those speeds are a big impact. Hitting a decent sized rock would be game over. We don't really know how dusty the big gulfs between stars are. Probably varies by region.

Then you have to brake.

mkopec said:

Also just to add to this conversation, Ive heard some scientists propose that without a moon they do nto think we would ever become a space fairing civ or it would take us way fucking longer, thats for sure. Think about it, without an actual close by target that we can actually see, measure and plan for, how much longer would a civilization take to undertake a manned space flight to some place without a moon?

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The moon makes us pretty unique in other ways also. It most probably made our atmosphere a lot thinner. The tides help keep the inner magneto heated up an running, which keeps our magnetic field strong (radiation protection). It stabilizes our rotation, otherwise we would have HUGE swings in climate all over the globe. Etc..

Which leads to one of the many millions of possible reasons why we haven't been visited (maybe). If there are a bunch of aliens out there then the vast majority of them evolved on worlds very different from our own. And they would be looking for worlds like theirs, not earth. Earth isn't prime real estate in their eyes, just a rock with thin air and a bunch of dumb monkeys.

It also means we won't be finding earth 2 very soon.

khorum said:

Lol that’s the Great Filter hypothesis

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Not really. I'm saying that what we assume about advanced civilization may not be correct, which is why we're confused by our current observations. They're out there, but not in the way we expect.

From that video:

"It's very likely that this is a universal principle for civilizations, no matter where they're from."

There's a whole lot baked into that single statement, and the entire following discussion rests on it.

khorum said:

It's entirely possible COMPLACENCY is why we don't see a sky full of dyson swarms and shkadov engines flying across the galaxy. It would be another candidate for the great filter.

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I'm trying to point out that the perceived lack of these things may be due to a failure of our knowledge/imagination rather than a failure of other civilizations.

Captain Suave said:

Not really. I'm saying that what we assume about advanced civilization may not be correct, which is why we don't see our expected observations.

From that video:

"It's very likely that this is a universal principle for civilizations, no matter where they're from."

There's a whole lot baked into that single statement, and the entire following discussion rests on it.

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So you're having trouble accepting that the universal laws of thermoeconomics, empirically shown to influence everything from cellular development to stock markets to the birth and death of galaxies, would apply equally to all civilizations?

Since the second law of thermodynamics is observed to govern all situations where unequal volumes of energy contend, it's been successfully interpretted by econophysicists to predict interactions between economies, by game theorists to predict market behaviors, to sociologist and historians to create accurate cliometric models for logistics and risk intelligence.

We don't have the data nor the means to accurately predict how alien civilizations would be motivated to expand, but we don't need either because we have the two most important clues: ONE they would be subject to the same universal laws of thermoeconomics as everything else and TWO we know the consequences of ecosystems that failed to anticipate the vagaries of entropy on the single sample of a life-bearing planet we have.

khorum said:

So you're having trouble accepting that the universal laws of thermoeconomics

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No, I'm suggesting that perhaps we're misinterpreting how those laws influence civilizational development on a large scale.

khorum said:

it's been successfully interpretted by econophysicists to predict interactions between economies, by game theorists to predict market behaviors, to sociologist and historians to create accurate cliometric models for logistics and risk intelligence.

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I have a degree from MIT and work in simulation myself. I know those kind of people, how those models are built, and which parts of them should be taken with a healthy dose of salt (Hint: It's always the embedded assumptions).

khorum said:

We don't have the data nor the means to accurately predict how alien civilizations would be motivated to expand

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My point.

khorum said:

ONE they would be subject to the same universal laws of thermoeconomics as everything else

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Never disagreed.

khorum said:

we know the consequences of ecosystems that failed to anticipate the vagaries of entropy

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I'm suggesting that we take a very close look at how "failure" is defined. I would not expand "failure" to include "achieved extended survival but remains undetected by current humans".

Captain Suave said:

I'm suggesting that we take a very close look at how "failure" is defined.

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Why? We know what happens when they fail and the observed state of the universe seems to confirm that some fail state halts 100% of all civilizations from reaching the first stage on the Kardashev scale. We don't need to confirm that Tabby's star or EPIC 204376071 are orbitted by megastructures since the question would really be, HOW DID THEY STOP. If some civilization could build a dyson swarm or a shkadov shell, they would be orders of magnitude more advanced than they'd need to be to colonize the entire galaxy.

Even the recent paper on the Aestivation Hypothesis admits that such an aestivating civilization would need daughter civilizations to colonize of its galaxy to maximize the probability of surviving entropy until the evaporation of its supergiant galactic core.

khorum said:

Why?

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Because this exercise is set up as a binary choice between "dead" and "filled the visible universe in a way noticeable to current humans" where the only justification is "entropy eventually wins", and that is a false dichotomy. The lack of a middle ground seems a failure of imagination. You keep referring to possible present-but-invisible-to-us civilizations as "fail states", but I would not classify them that way.

We have the laws of thermodynamics and exactly one data point on possible chemical/environmental/historical/civilizational paths to intelligence. That's one data point and who knows how many degrees of freedom. Making any strong assertions about other intelligences on a near-infinite time horizon based on that can't help but be an error-prone exercise. Sure, we can build theories internally consistent to our current understanding, but we have to also be willing to entertain that whatever we don't know about physics (some) and advanced civilizations (anything, beyond the perceived absence of certain indicators) importantly informs the conclusions.

Captain Suave said:

Sure, we can build theories based on our current understanding, but we have to also be willing to entertain that whatever we don't know about physics (some) and advanced civilizations (anything) importantly informs the conclusions.

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Then by all means entertain them. If there's a way that a civilization would eventually advance to transcend thermodynamic law WITHOUT leaving behind every previous stage of their development littered across the universe then that's worth discussing.

Given those things we do know---that all civilizations would be subject to thermoeconomic law at the early stages of their advancement, that civilizations with 1969 technology could have colonized the entire Milky Way 100 times over by now, and that failure or unwillingness to respond to entropic externalities would precipitate extinction---how could a civilization have advanced beyond the governance of the laws of thermodynamics without leaving behind evidence of their prior stages of development?

Even if they were aestivating until the universe cools enough to maximize computational power they would be surrounded by a galaxy fully engaged towards their survival.

khorum said:

a civilization would eventually advance to transcend thermodynamic law

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Not what I said.

What I'm suggesting is some combination of the following:

a) Physics/engineering currently unknown to us influences advanced civilizational development in a way that conforms to our current observations.
b) Given sufficient knowledge/development, advanced civilizations cease being interested in infinite survival/expansion and become reconciled to the idea that their existence has a finite expiration date.

I don't classify b) as "failure" so much as "respects the limits given by physical law". As we understand it, nothing will last forever no matter how many galaxies worth of mass-energy you can stockpile.

Are these UNLIKELY explanations of what we see? Given what we know, perhaps, but as I've been trying to point out, "given" is a heavily loaded word. I don't think they can be written off as implausible. We know there big holes in our knowledge in this arena, so even making basic assumptions like "advanced civilizations want to survive forever" should be on the table for debate.

None of this is trying to refute the story most people tell that a competitive, biological, procreative, expansion-driven civilization should probably yield visible artifacts. I agree there, and this may mean the Great Filter is real and scary for us. However, there's no reason to think those predicates are absolute and rule out other alternatives for "success", at least as I'm defining it.

OhSeven said:

My own personal somewhat unsettling theory is that we humans are actually the first intelligent species, and as we advance and find other intelligent but less advanced species we'll come to the realization that literally no one else in the universe has a better grasp of what's going on than humans.

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The thing with that theory is that "We're the First" inevitably leads to "There only needs to be ONE" which inevitably leads to "We must be the only ones".

While most of the responses to the Fermi Paradox necessarily use the past to answer the question, the fact is the FIRST CIVILIZATION to rise to Kardashev-2 levels would have an insurmountable advantage going into the entirety of the future.

If we're the first, and there only needs to be one, then why would our future selves ever allow another competing civilization to reach parity with us? The only possibilty we would need to contemplate is if future civilizations will ever manage to find a way to alter the past. Because then you would really only need one, because the first to do so would prune all the past to guarantee that the first civilization would always ever be the only one.

Sentagur said:

You also fail to take into account that motivations of a advanced civilisation might change in the course of hundreds of thousands of years it takes to infest the whole galaxy.
Becoming a multi planetary species is barely a motivation for our species right now and Alien civs might have completely different goals because of completely different obstacles they had to overcome in their evolution.

If we ever get to the post scarcity level we are going to change too, maybe not over night but in a few generations definitely. Infinite expansion might not be a goal worth pursuing in the future even if we never figure out digitizing a consciousness.

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No they didn't fail to account for it, don't NEED to account for it.

Once again, as entertaining as it may be to anthropomorphize hypothetical alien civilization---they could find jesus and reject capitalism one generation or discover marxism and try to settle into a marxist-like Malthusian spiral in another generation---we DO NOT NEED TO imagine the shifting priorities of hypothetical alien civilizations. We just need to use what information we have confirmed empirically that governs the regulation and distribution of energy of all things from sub-cellular organisms to the cliodynamic cycles of ancient Rome.

We know that no known organism willingly surrenders to entropy so long as there is a remote chance of survival. We know that the second law compels energy to move from volumes of high concentration to volumes with lower concentration. We know that ecosystems which have failed to respond to entropic externalities have met mass extinctions at least five times in the one sample we have. We've been shown that civilizations that arrive at the capacity for spaceflight we achieved in 1969 could have colonized the entire galaxy 100 times over since the time the galaxy cooled enough to harbor Earth-like planets.

So the prospect that a civilization would find some "zen moment" and accept the futility of survival is not only a possibility, but is one of the potential Great Filters that regulated the rise of advanced civilizations across the universe. That's actually MY favored prospect of all, the Malthusian End-State, wherein hypothetical civilizations are COMPELLED by the same thermoeconomic forces to redistribute energy equally across every member of the civilization and reach a point-of-no-return where that civilization can no longer sustain its population/energy equilibrium and survive civilization-ending externalities at the same time.

1969 keeps coming up because Heir and Hedman noted that was the last time >95% of the Earth's resources was under the control of less than 10% of the population that was bent on sending a man to the moon. Afterwards rising populations and the entropic reaction against that inequality inevitably VOTED US back down to Earth.

It's Socialism as a Great Filter.

khorum said:

We know that no known organism willingly surrenders to entropy so long as there is a remote chance of survival.

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Nitpicking, but this is observably untrue. Life is littered with organisms taking actions that result in sub-maximal survival. Obviously there's a selection bias towards the outcomes that increase species survival, but that's not the same thing and mostly only applies to pre-reproductive decisions.

khorum said:

So the prospect that a civilization would find some "zen moment" and accept the futility of survival is not only a possibility, but is one of the potential Great Filters that regulated the rise of advanced civilizations across the universe... That's actually MY favored prospect of all

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So are we essentially agreeing, then, and just quibbling over whether that outcome gets categorized as a "failure" or some other label?

Captain Suave said:

So are we essentially agreeing, then, and just quibbling over whether that outcome gets categorized as a "failure" or some other label?

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No I'd categorize that as failure for sure lol. That still results in extinction. Willingly accepted or not, it would be a failure that would qualify as a Great Filter that resolves the Fermi Paradox.

But once again this whole line of argument started with people objecting to the Great Filter hypothesis the Astronomy Thread, where I more or less proposed that civilizations would meet a Malthusian dead-end long before they become Kardashev-1 civilizations as a Great Filter. Dunno why it moved over here without it.

Kharzette said:

It doesn't really take any super long term planning if you get an energy based propellant free engine design going. Distances start to even out where there's not much difference in 100 light years and crossing the entire galaxy. Just need to build big and stack alot of ice at the front.

Last time I looked at the numbers I think you could cross the entire galaxy in 22 years of subjective time if you could maintain a 1G accel. It is a big if though, relative mass increases near C, and even dust grains at those speeds are a big impact. Hitting a decent sized rock would be game over. We don't really know how dusty the big gulfs between stars are. Probably varies by region.

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Bolded part is what I've always seen as the greatest obstacle. Even if you can get moving fast enough, how can you be sure your path is clear?

You can't be sure the path is clear. You'd engineer the costs of mitigating those impacts through detection/shielding and factor that in to the vessel's mass. Then it becomes a matter of the energy to accelerate that mass at a sustained rate.

At 1g constant acceleration and 1g deceleration at the halfway point it would take a vessel less than 4 hours to reach the moon.

Why can all the other races' ships always catch up to a full speed federation ship?