The Fermi Paradox -- Where is everybody?

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khorum

khorum

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While I agree with you big picture, people probably won't do anything about this until they can personally go. The biological determinism isn't going to let people do that. It's too far off in the future and people won't care.
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Yep exactly. It needs to become an IMMEDIATE necessity.

So get the swollest V10 gas guzzler you can find and short every solar and wind stock on the market.

By 2080 there will be 12 billion humans fighting over a third of the freshwater we take for granted today.

Unless we want to contemplate atrocities measured in gigadeaths we need to get off the planet.
 
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Captain Suave

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Cad said:
While I agree with you big picture, people probably won't do anything about this until they can personally go.
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If we had the tech there would be a long line of people willing to launch interstellar self-replicating AI-powered probes.

Hell, I'd do it just because it would be the single most awesome achievement in human history.
 
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Cad

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Captain Suave said:
I'm sure if we had the tech there would be a long line of people willing to launch interstellar self-replicating AI-powered probes.

Hell, I'd do it just because it would be the single most awesome achievement in human history.
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Not to you it wouldn't be, because you'd watch it launch and you'd get old and die before it left the solar system. It'd be a pretty brutal blue-balling.
 
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Captain Suave

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Not to you it wouldn't be, because you'd watch it launch and you'd get old and die before it left the solar system.
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Sure I would. I'm not so short-sighted that I need to experience the final payoff personally for something to be worth doing. It's perfectly possible to extract intermediate rewards from a project that exceeds my own lifespan. (Building companies, raising kids, political reform, scientific research, etc, etc.)
 
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Sentagur

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Captain Suave said:
Sure I would. I'm not so short-sighted that I need to experience the final payoff personally for something to be worth doing. It's perfectly possible to extract intermediate rewards from a project that exceeds my own lifespan. (Building companies, raising kids, political reform, scientific research, etc, etc.)
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Yeah maybe some of us would like to explore the galaxy yet there are alos people who think we should focus on the problems on our planet and forget about space for now. You think we can get everyone on board for something this massive?
You also need to translate this idea into a reality where political power, economic motivation, and human nature all work on a 4-25 year cycle. You would need some pretty entrenched top down tyranny to actually go through with a massive project that requires significant resources and doesnt pay off in several generations(if at all)
The only thing that could push us would be if we faced an imminent extinction threat and even then i am not sure people could actually agree on the best plan of action to focus the resources into colonizing space.

God damn it i think they turned me into a pessimist.
 
iannis

iannis

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If we hit post scarcity, with fusion or elemental transmutation, well do it just because we can and it's challenging. Rewards and risks change. Hell, some group would attempt it as performance art.

It will not take as large a group to do it. That's an important assumption.

If your core needs are met you begin to invent new needs. Humans are truly perverse in this way. We are not an easily contented life form. The pinnacle of marlows hierarchy might as well be labeled "everything else".

Which does make fermis question continually relevant.

But we imagine a sphere being filled, and that colonized territory is never relenquished. Maybe it looks more like a whitecap than a wave.
 
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Lambourne

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A ship taking a thousand years to get to another star is only a problem if you have a limited lifespan. There's research being done into aging and we may well be on the cusp of discovering ways to halt or reverse aging completely. It's probably considerably easier than any sort of warp drive because it doesn't need a new understanding of physics, just a better understanding of biology. We even have examples in nature we can study (when a bacteria splits into two, one of the new cells ages and dies, and the other actually rejuvenates)
If you live for hundreds of thousands of years (or potentially forever), interstellar travel at low speeds becomes entirely viable and even a necessity due to an ever expanding population.

In a related thought, I've been reading about the simulation argument and it's hard to find fault with some of the reasoning. Maybe it's a good way to spend the travel time. "Take the starship to Rigel, it'll take 2000 years to get there but we'll plug you into our simulation and you get to expand your horizons by experiencing a few centuries worth of life in a simulation of the 20th/21st century."
 
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iannis

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The simulation argument is unassailable. It's unassailable because it is unfalsifiable. It's also impossible to prove correct.

It's not really a theory so much as it is a type of solopism. It's useful in the way that any consideration of philosophy is useful. But it's a modern version of a chapter from Descartes. And his was a reimagining of insights much older than that. You can find the thread of the argument in the Upanishads. The only real difference is the language they used to describe the idea. But the idea that we are God awakening to his own Reality is not structurally different than the idea that we are entities involved in a simulation within some higher reality for purposes unknown and unknowable.
 
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Sadre Spinegnawer

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Lambourne said:
A ship taking a thousand years to get to another star is only a problem if you have a limited lifespan. There's research being done into aging and we may well be on the cusp of discovering ways to halt or reverse aging completely. It's probably considerably easier than any sort of warp drive because it doesn't need a new understanding of physics, just a better understanding of biology. We even have examples in nature we can study (when a bacteria splits into two, one of the new cells ages and dies, and the other actually rejuvenates)
If you live for hundreds of thousands of years (or potentially forever), interstellar travel at low speeds becomes entirely viable and even a necessity due to an ever expanding population.

In a related thought, I've been reading about the simulation argument and it's hard to find fault with some of the reasoning. Maybe it's a good way to spend the travel time. "Take the starship to Rigel, it'll take 2000 years to get there but we'll plug you into our simulation and you get to expand your horizons by experiencing a few centuries worth of life in a simulation of the 20th/21st century."
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My psychiatrist, that I see twice a month and has me on mil-spec psychoactives, tells me only a madman would want to live for for that 70 years or so. Freddie agrees.

 
Ukerric

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Cad said:
Why would you want to take that trip? You'd die on the colony ship and your distant descendants would get to claw their way back out of feudalism. Meanwhile if you stay on earth you can work your office job and have a comfortable post-information age life.
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"All it takes is one."

One person per million is willing to do that? That's more than enough for your 1k colony.
 
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Lambourne

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iannis said:
The simulation argument is unassailable. It's unassailable because it is unfalsifiable. It's also impossible to prove correct.

It's not really a theory so much as it is a type of solopism. It's useful in the way that any consideration of philosophy is useful. But it's a modern version of a chapter from Descartes. And his was a reimagining of insights much older than that. You can find the thread of the argument in the Upanishads. The only real difference is the language they used to describe the idea. But the idea that we are God awakening to his own Reality is not structurally different than the idea that we are entities involved in a simulation within some higher reality for purposes unknown and unknowable.
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That's true. I haven't studied solipsism in any great detail but I do think the simulation argument has an advantage in that we can actually see a technological path leading to it. The largest missing piece is a direct brain-computer interface, which already exists in rudimentary form and is an area of ongoing research (one of Elon Musk's companies is working on it). Don't know if you've ever read about Neuralink, but it has the potential to change the world as much as the printing press or the internet did.

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Sadre Spinegnawer said:
My psychiatrist, that I see twice a month and has me on mil-spec psychoactives, tells me only a madman would want to live for for that 70 years or so. Freddie agrees.

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I've always taken that song to be about the inevitable loss that comes with time. I'm not quite as fatalistic though, people do eventually learn to live with loss and new love can bloom. Still, there's a whole host of unanswered questions to contemplate. Would someone who knows he has a good chance of living a thousand years worry less about death than we do? How would you relate to a brother that's 250 years younger than you?
 
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khorum

khorum

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Cad said:
Not to you it wouldn't be, because you'd watch it launch and you'd get old and die before it left the solar system. It'd be a pretty brutal blue-balling.
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It would never be us. Unless we successfully virtualize a human connectome, the only humans that would ever leave the solar system would leave in the form of frozen embryos.

Even if we stick to the modest speed of 25% of light speed, which is achievable today with some version of a magnetoplasma rocket accelerating for a few months, the likelihood of interstellar impacts would require either tremendous shielding or tremendous redundancy. Of those two, it's redundancy that's most efficient. The best way to maximize the chances of success is to launch hundreds or thousands of very light and very cheap seedships that contain frozen embryos and self-replicating Von Neumann machines at each target star. The more we launch the higher the likelihood some of them will survive the journey.

We wouldn't need to boost the mass for supplies or life support to sustain adult humans and we don't need to invent reliable cryostasis for adult humans, we already have proven cryostasis for embryos. A seebeck RTG with enough isotope can power a tiny craft for thousands of years.
 
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Cad

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khorum said:
It would never be us. Unless we successfully virtualize a human connectome, the only humans that would ever leave the solar system would leave in the form of frozen embryos.

Even if we stick to the modest speed of 25% of light speed, which is achievable today with some version of a magnetoplasma rocket accelerating for a few months, the likelihood of interstellar impacts would require either tremendous shielding or tremendous redundancy. Of those two, it's redundancy that's most efficient. The best way to maximize the chances of success is to launch hundreds or thousands of very light and very cheap seedships that contain frozen embryos and self-replicating Von Neumann machines at each target star. The more we launch the higher the likelihood some of them will survive the journey.

We wouldn't need to boost the mass for supplies or life support to sustain adult humans and we don't need to invent reliable cryostasis for adult humans, we already have proven cryostasis for embryos. A seebeck RTG with enough isotope can power a tiny craft for thousands of years.
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Technically I think this would be okay, although your seeded colonies would take forever to grow... but what kind of society would this produce? Children raised by... whom? Wouldn't you end up with a bunch of totally feral children with no culture? No parents and no adults to teach them about us?

How would they learn to speak? Read? Anything?
 
khorum

khorum

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They would be gestated, educated and trained by the self-replicating robots....but that would be at the end of the colonization process that could take centuries. The robots would build the habitats for them and maybe even local terraforming. The embryos would stay frozen inside the seedships in orbit for however long it takes to complete their habitats, since there wouldnt be room to gestate the embryos or grow the agriculture to feed them on the seedships. By the time the colonists are born there would need to be a functioning life support environment and enough viable agriculture to sustain them.

If it takes a few hundred of years to complete, that wouldn't be a fraction of the time it took for the insterstellar passage.
 
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iannis

iannis

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You can't really guess what sort of society would pop out the other side. Besides for probably "very odd".

It would be like being born in Eden with a copy of the Bible and being told that the Bible is absolutely, verifiably, factually correct. Because you're not going to go to all that engineering trouble without also providing solutions to common social and societal issues. You will include a code of ethics and law. Even if that is "we fucked it up so bad, our world is burning, here's what you need to avoid" or "you have options"

Maybe people will just throw homospunk at the stars and figgure it will probably work itself out somehow. I kinda doubt it.
 
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maskedmelon

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Captain Suave said:
Sure I would. I'm not so short-sighted that I need to experience the final payoff personally for something to be worth doing. It's perfectly possible to extract intermediate rewards from a project that exceeds my own lifespan. (Building companies, raising kids, political reform, scientific research, etc, etc.)
Click to expand...

I'd totes fill a synthetic being full of my donated girlseed so that it could flutter off to another galaxy and cultivate an entire civilization of beautiful mini-mes. idgaf if I get to actually witness my brood subsume reality as we know it with the shining brilliance of my divine intellect. The assurance alone is enough to let me to rest contentedly.
 
reavor

reavor

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khorum said:
Yep exactly. It needs to become an IMMEDIATE necessity.

So get the swollest V10 gas guzzler you can find and short every solar and wind stock on the market.

By 2080 there will be 12 billion humans fighting over a third of the freshwater we take for granted today.

Unless we want to contemplate atrocities measured in gigadeaths we need to get off the planet.
Click to expand...

I wonder if that may be the underlying schism between two ideologies about the future of humankind. One (globalist) trying to "power down" humanity for resources to last longer, and potentially get off the planet in the far future. The other ideology that has now sprung up saying screw that, pedal to the metal, we can't wait that long, it's MAGA and then to the stars.
 
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Kharzette

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One of the best books I've read in many years, House of Suns, is about crazy rich people cloning themselves 1000 times and sending them all out on ships to cruise around the galaxy and be awesome.
 
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Cybsled

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khorum said:
Survival.

Right now everything our biosphere has ever achieved is at risk because cow farts might thaw the Siberian taiga and induce a runaway greenhouse effect that would dwarf the Permian die-off.

We can either leave a space monument that says “oops” or insure the continuity of the human genome across the whole galaxy.
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Right. Basically the only practical reason for sub-light travel on massive time frames is it is perceived as a way to ensure the continuation of the species. There would be virtually no other benefit, unless your civilization is okay with your FedEx delivery of Unobtanium only arriving once every 5,000 years.
 
Ukerric

Ukerric

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Kharzette said:
One of the best books I've read in many years, House of Suns, is about crazy rich people cloning themselves 1000 times and sending them all out on ships to cruise around the galaxy and be awesome.
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Alastair Reynolds is good at "Hard SF".
 
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