Why the Universe Is Silent with Dr. Robin Hanson
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- Опубликовано: 31 май 2024
- My guest today is Dr. Robin Hanson, an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. Dr. Hanson is famous for writing a paper describing the Great Filter, a theory that explains why we don't see aliens across the Universe.
www.overcomingbias.com/
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This may be my favorite conversation/interview you've ever done, Fraser! That's saying a lot, because you always bring us really interesting guests. Thanks, and keep up the great work!
I love this topic, never gets old and Hanson is awesomely well informed. He just has the slightly annoying habit of ending every sentence with a chuckle or a laugh. After an hour that starts to grate on you.
I took that to be nervous laughter.
🦊
Boy, you are not lying.
I mean he was probably nervous , no need to call him out on that I doubt he can control it. Everyone has their quirks. Very intelligent man though,
I too noticed that nervous laughter.
Can only guess why.
While I'd not want to live forever, I'd love the idea of periodically checking to see how life, the Universe and human knowledge is progressing.
I have always felt the exact same way .
You can watch from the other side
Fraser I am a listener and fan since the first days of astronomy cast. This is one of the most mind blowing interviews I‘ve ever heard. Thank you, greetings from Austria.
"Servus!" from Redondo Beach -- home of the JWST! (We are very chill here!)
The universe is a much more interesting place once you realise aliens don't exist.
Ignorant people suffer from an emotional attachment to aliens as they desire to transcend their mundane existence. These emotions inhibit an honest assessment of the Fermi Paradox.
"We didn't fight wars with each other..." At what point in all of human history was that time? I'm pretty sure we've always fought wars with each other. It's kind of humanity's thing.
Yeah I was also questioning this bit. In fact, the further back you look in history the more violent humans were. Even living in tribes this is when most intertribal wars and murders happen
I once saw a video where all the wars of recent times were graphically depicted over the background of earth, each time there was a war there was an explosion depicted at that location. There were constant explosions going off all over the place. At one point the whole world practically went up in flames. Humans are insane.
@@dustman96 have you got a link to this? If you guys have not read the book "The Better Angles of our Nature" I highly recommend. I really explains why violence has declined over human history
Yeah, we're really good at it.
He was talking about the small hunter-gatherer groups. The groups didn't fight within themselves. Of course they might fight with other groups they met.
Amazing interview, almost makes one want to live 150 billion years to see how our current universe plays out. Truly inspiring, thank you both!
I mean, I wanted to live 150 billion before this today. Though yes, this reinforces my want and need to live 150 billion years!
❤Yes 😊
I'll volunteer for the 150 billion years of life experiment.
There's a giant presumption speculators on the possibility of alien contact never seem to consider: the miniscule scale of human metabolism. Compared to galactic time and distance scales, human awareness and lifespan are microscopic. In the simplest terms, our sense of the passage of time is far too hyperactive to personally perceive the majestic pace of events that occur on a galactic scale. That is why the universe appears so inconceiveably enormous and ancient compared to our fleetingly brief lifespans. If there are galaxy-spanning civilizations somewhere out there, it's likely their metabolisms and lifespans are far better suited to galactic scales than are ours. To them, we would appear as hyperactive insects with lives too brief to support communication for more than a few perceived instants of their own lifespans.
All of this seems to rely on the idea that an intelligent civilization will choose to advance and expand. What if a truly advanced intelligence realizes that equilibrium and balance are a more optimal goal?
I'm a proud member of Paralox of andromeda civilization and I approve this human unfeaseble video.
My issue with economics in general is they treat “growth” as good. Until we have a paradigm shift in economics that stops treating growth as good we will not progress. We need to reach a point of stability in sustainability. I suspect the higher the intelligence of a species the shorter their existence before extinction.
As societies become more educated, they have fewer children, so that should put the brakes on growth.
Holy smokes, Fraiser! Fantastic interview 😎 So many perspectives that I never thought of or considered. Some of them scare the bejesus out of me! Thank you, I think... LOL.
The more we get away from anthropic reasoning the better we will be at this predictive gaming. Love this episode.
It's best to give a guy like Hanson free reign, only prompting him to the next topic when he's finished.
How far into the past are we looking when we see other galaxies? Little difficult to tell what's going on when you're looking that far into the past. Maybe there's nobody in the galaxies "near" us, but we're looking at a very tiny slice of time, so I don't think we have the faintest clue on what's out there. There could be some galaxy vs galaxy war that's going on right now that we won't know about for hundreds of millions of years from now.
This is my gripe with the Fermi paradox as well. We aren't just looking through space, we are looking through time. We can't even see through the edge of our on solar system (oort cloud) without only seeing events which are a few years old, looking beyond our local star cluster let alone into other galaxies and we are talking about centuries to thousands of years to millenia, which might be enough to see planetary processes such as oxygen atmospheres, but is certainly enough to hide any technological signatures from us for a very long time.
@damianGray the time factor is a big one. It's why one of the big uncertainties in the Drake Equation concerns the length of time a given civilisation persists. They could be inherently unstable - we just don't know.
Considering the speed of light is the speed of causality. When thinking normally it seems like we're looking back on time. But we're just seeing how events are happening from our reference frame, for all intents and purposes we are seeing the events in real time.
oh yea everyone deeply thinking about the ferm paradox just forgot to take the fact that seeing things far away actually sees them as they were a long time ago! that definitely happened!@@damianGray
@@wasdwasdedsfexactly.
Awesome interview, thanks Dr. Cain & Dr. Robin ') Super philosophical...I digged it...I digged it hard!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Underground Rock People for the win!
That was a great interview!
Thank you two for the interview.
I didn't understand all the (mathematical) intricacies of the model. But it seems to me that the most important quote here was: "If you want to be optimistic about SETI".
I'm a 2006 Mason Alumni. Awesome to see a teacher from my college here :)
Really really fascinating! Thank you so much, I love listening to your channel while I run!
Thank you Fraser Cain. Exceptional interview with a thought provoking guest!
In the time it will take us to colonize 1,000,000 galaxies, we will evolve into so many different successor species over that space. The ones at the edges who meet actual aliens might have trouble telling the difference!
The 'For we have met the Aliens and they are us" theory.
And don't forget that galaxies move away from each other pretty fast. And accelerating...
53:00 You're describing the Firefly universe with the alliance maintaining a nice civilized control and the brown coat nomads on the outskirts :P So many interesting dichotomies to human lifeforms interacting with each other
This was an excellent conversation!
I love that I rewatched the titan episode and the new q&a came out when I finished that episode and now that I just finished that episode this one came up🥰
Thought provoking interview. Prof. Hanson can be a bit much at times.
Why would anyone want to take apart a star? It’s like dismantling a generator because you’re tired of electricity.
Resources. Lots of them
Maybe they want to save the resource (the hydrogen and helium etc) until later. When the universes heat death occurs, those that have a few spare starsworth of fuel will do best.
Dr. Hanson is a year younger than I am. He has some engaging things to say, and I find myself looking at these issues differently than before I heard his ideas.
Wow, Robin Hanson in the flesh! Thank you so much Fraser!
55:47. Hanson response was "we already see cosmic astronomical processes out there, -- would have to come from one of these processes -- " What? No. You cannot know what you do not know, Hanson's response was a non sequitur fallacy. Fraser you stated clearly this would be something we do not know of, I agree.
I am listening while painting a picture for a very nice woman, that I'd like to see me as indispensable; it is Easter, and after weeks of painting, I am drawing near completing it. -I think I will rerun the interview, as it has been very good to juggle thoughts, while managing my +80 layers in Photoshop, and not stand off from the task at hand.
Thanks to both Fraser Cain and Robin Hanson, for being a good background source :3
Like US Marines, who talk about doing so much for so long with so little, perhaps it is normal for advanced civilizations to be able to do almost anything with nothing for ever. This would make them difficult to detect, even when very large
I think we have a very limited concept of time. The universe is beautiful but it’s ruthless.
Just like the ladies, the very hot 🔥 ladies 🎉
When it comes to the Drake equation, I think Paul M. Sutter is on to something; You can only multiply the probabilities like that, if they're independent of eachother. If one "item" is true, it might make one - or several - of the others LESS likely, and maybe to a great degree.
Everest has actually been impacted quite a bit by human visitation. There's at least a few dead climbers (actually about 200), still there, plus lots of trash. Humans leave trash wherever we go. It's quite disgusting.
If we’re doomed, it’s only because we are progressively dooming ourselves.
There have been 5 Great Extinctions, but Earth is still living. Can we just assume that once life takes hold nothing can stop it short of resurfacing?
No probably we were very lucky and the extinctions only show us how lucky we were. A bigger asteroid in the KT-catastrophe that killed the dinosaurs and many other life forms could have set back life for a much longer time and we could still be hundreds of million years away from a possible civilisation on earth with a high probability of other severe extinction events on that way.
the key question is how could we see an alien civilization? i think we would not see it - even in our area in the galaxiy
Are all Alien Civilizations made of... Dark matter?
Are they invisible, or what?
Thanks for the all the content.
Fascinating ideas
Most important science interview of the year!
Fascinating interview
The "average" star (by mass) has a mass of 0.34 solar masses and lasts 167 billion years.
Did he say somewhere that an average star lasts 5 trillion years? I thought I missed the discussion and he was trying to show the absurdity of a theory by this outcome etc.
@@endercetiner4832 The graph of main sequence lifetime (y) versus star mass (x) looks similar to exponential decline. A M9/L0 star, 0.078 solar masses, barely big enough to be on the main sequence, lives about 12 trillion years. But with increasing mass that lifetime declines swiftly at first, and then more slowly later on.
(I had to add a post-decimal-point zero to the minimum mass of a red dwarf star. It's 0.078 solar masses, not 0.78 solar masses.)
@@Jenab7 I think only red dwarfs last these durations. And they eliminate any life really quickly.
@@cuthbertmilligen Those red dwarf planets don't evolve life in the first place. But all stars go through a tempestuous youth, with big flares and lots of wind. They settle down later. But red dwarfs' "youth" is probably longer than the universe is old, so far.
Very thought provoking discussion but it does have the feel of impeccably reasoned arguments by nineteenth century scientists. There seems to be a lot of whitespace in it and there's just so much we haven't observed or thought of, yet.
Nineteenth century scientists got a lot of things right though. Most the things they got wrong were not totally silly or unreasonable. Of course there is a lot we don't know. But there is nothing wrong with trying our best to estimate from what we do know.
Really thought provoking
Very interesting. Thanks, guys
Loved this one a lot
Fascinating video with a very engaging guest. Truly awesome concepts here. Almost broaching infinity as far as our tiny familiar concept of time is concerned.
Interesting conversation! Hard to comprehend this phrase for me "they are expanding near the speed of light".
I also like Dr. Hanson's black-matter style mug 🙂
The original Star Trek series was preoccupied even in the late 60s with societies that were stifled or endangered by artificial intelligence that had to be destroyed or circumvented, such as The Apple, Spock's Brain, Return of the Archons, and A Taste of Armageddon. No, I don't have a life.
Star Wars
The biggest filter is propulsion, as in developing faster than light travel. Though we have the theoretical model Alcubierre model. Which creates bubble around a ship and by stretching and contracting space time you in theory can break the light barrier. But if you ask how do we get from theory to applied engineering principles they create a concrete prototyping. No one knows.
You could still completely colonize the galaxy in a fraction of the age of the universe with slower than light tech. If warp drives were possible, that would make the great filter even more extreme. As something far beyond the observable universe could appear here suddenly and start colonizing at an insane speed.
Great talk
We went from vacuum tubes to potentially thinking machines in like 100 yrs. That's literally no time at all. This suggests that any species able to create a form of computing would likely create thinking machines eventually. Could be another great filter.
Question for you Fraser: what will happen to the Parker Solar Probe at the end of its life? Will its orbit decay until it's consumed by the Sun? Or will it just remain in a close heliocentric orbit over the long term?
Do you have any tips on how to improve the quality of a tele-conference?
I realize this one was a little choppy, but as I work with them almost exclusively now too, live, I was wondering if you have any favorite program(s) or app, regarding video and audio quality and/or features
Thanks
Which part? The quality of the audio and video? I use Zoom for the meetings. A good headset is fine, the key is having a mic that’s close to your mouth. For video, there’s not much you can do without a good camera, but good lighting definitely helps.
@@frasercain Thanks yeah I also use Zoom I was wondering, but I find it very lackluster, more so for the specific features I require.
I've been thinking about writing my own version of it (starting out from a generic clone), improve it, test it on my business, and go from there.
Maybe even go commercial with it eventually, if it pans out. But atm my JS coding is rusty, to put it mildly.
I use OBS to composite my screen and then the Virtual Camera as input into Zoom. That gives you the most control over what’s on your screen.
@@frasercain Thank you! I've been meaning to try OBS in that particular way (I've only used it to record screen so far), it's the possibility (even if very unlikely) of even more lag for the viewer/client, that has prevented me from doing so.
So, we look back in time with our current instruments, and don't see what exists now "over there". 🤔 Perhaps the dark areas in the universe are places from where the light already passed us by, and where the light switch now has been turned off.
So at 24:00 he says theyre moving so fast that we wobr see them ubtil theyre almost here. What exactly doesbhe mean by that? That we cant detect spaceships traveling that fast? Or something else?
I'd never heard of the concept of "software rot", which Dr. Hanson extrapolated to legal or societal rot, further tying it in to the global "don't you dare question conventional wisdom" Covid response, and yet how many things got shaken up due to this global, choreographed-yet-chaotic response? Governments, couples, careers, plans, lives... staying the course actually ended up overturning or thwarting situations where entropy was setting in.
Yes I found this aspect of this talk really disturbing actually. It was just a jump too to imply that some sort of world consensus is the beginning of social stagnation. There were really good reasons why we didn't allow human experimentation during covid, why we don't sell organs and why nuclear power was so feared ( imagine every country posessing the ability to manufacture their own weapons). He is no doubt a very smart man but somehow I can't help that his political beliefs have crepted into the conversation. The very things that he seems to think are minor were examples of why humanity colonizing the galaxy is such a terrifying prospect. Imagine the nightmare of Stalins and Hitler's rampaging around with the powers of Gods. Imagine some lunatic creating his own version of hell within a computer enslaving billions of people.
Silence, the universe's primordial essence, birthed first...
This is a good one Frasier. And they're all pretty good but this one's real good
As a long time listener, I know your opinions and viewpoints pretty well 😉 and If I could change anything, I would just have you challenge him a bit more on some of the views he puts forth
Yeah, we were already overtime and I was looking to wrap up the conversation at that point. I definitely would have pushed back on the unity as Great Filter explanation. If we can imagine it, then it can't be the Great Filter. :-)
@@frasercain it's funny how my fiance and I are watching, and at a few different moments she looked at me with a bewildered face....
"It's an interview hun, not a debate. He's being polite."
I did very Much enjoy his viewpoint though. I don't want this to come off as though I think it's one team vs another..... it was just a great conversation
@@frasercain A very interesting possibility is just evolution - that is, those species that go silent, are ALWAYS naturally selected over those that try to be grabby. No catastrophe, no event. Just slow evolution and natural selection. Entropy never stops, no matter how "advanced" we get.
All of this is based on what we see at this time but what we are seeing is a tiny snapshot and most of that snapshot is so far back in time that we're we in a reversed position we wouldn't even see our tiny snapshot
Excellent interview but a lot of it went over my head, I still dont really understand why finding life on Mars would be a negative thing for our search for other life in the Galaxy/Universe? Surely if life can flourish next door to us then could it not start everywhere?
It makes it more bizarre that we don't see life everywhere, which means that something kills life when it reaches an advanced civilization. Hey... we're an advanced civilization. Uh oh.
If life is very very very rare this could explain why we don't see other civilisations. But if we find independent multicellular sexually reproducing life on Mars we have to conclude that advanced life forms are not rare and we have to come up with an other explanation why we don't see other civilisations. And there would be two main explanations left. First that the step from advanced life to civilisation is very very very improbable. Or (very negative for us) that civilisations die very fast. Our civilisation (space probes and radio astronomy and therefore ability of interstellar communication) is only about 60 years old and in many ways very instable (nuclear weapons, climate change, depletion of fossile energy ressources, biodiversity loss, possiblility of bio-weapons, broadening of addictive behavior etc.) so that it seems to be improbable that we still have a civilisation with space probes and radio astronomy in a thousand years.
@@dr.andreasleofaulstich4125 Thank you Doctor that makes a bit more sense now...👍
not a lot of detectable life out there, there must be some filter blocking the event of this phenomena. As Robin tells us this filter is either at the beginning of life, or at the end of civilization. So if we find life on mars, that means the filter probably isnt at the beginning, as it happened at least twice in our vicinity. Therefor the filter must be at the end, hence the bad news for us. The filter is coming.. Yes the universe would be teaming with life and flourishing perhaps, but life would probably have a lesser chance of becoming super civilizations
You're misstating his position somewhat. He said it would be bad for OUR future chances, but his grabby alien theory still predicts that the universe already is teeming with rapidly expanding civilizations that have passed all the filters.
Why bad for us? Because we WANT the filters to be behind us, not ahead of us. So we want the original emergence of life to be a filter and a hard step. But if life occured on Mars too, independently, that doesn't seem like a filter, which in turn increases the risk that the filter is ahead of us.
But either way, the grabby aliens are already out there grabbing, because that's the most reasonable explanation for our earliness. Which perhaps seems like a completely mysterious statement, but it makes perfect sense...
Very stimulating interview! I really enjoyed it.
One response to the human caused "1-10 million year to recover" discussion 55:50.
I think the point a pessimist like myself would make is that you don't need a steady state, a cycle would do just fine. In that 1-10 million years, the "recovered" humans, or whatever they would be the next go-around, would regain the technological capacity to mostly destroy themselves, and would do so again. That would keep things quiet.
Underlying the idea is the argument that the problem is fundamental, evolution selects for capacities and drives that are not compatible with the existence of these sorts of destructive technologies. This is not hard for me to believe, having seen how "good men" can behave in combat.
This grabby aliens hypothesis is a really revolutionary way of solving the Fermi Paradox.
...and a very unlikely and fictiony one, too...
Pure fantasy stuff
Not so much a "grabby" universe. More like other civilizations NEED resources.
Allies of Humanity briefings. Audiobooks. Book 1 & 2.
We won't last more than another 1000 years, and I'm optimistic.
Thanks!
Signals from the out side? Why would you expect to get any of that with out farming observations of newer solar systems for them?
You made me remember of this episode of "The Outer Limits" where technology was at the point that some kid would build by himself a world ending weapon.
Cool guy and certainly brings some science to understanding our place in the universe.
We need to start building 10 humungous, fully self contained / sustainable MOTHER SHIPs that will accommodate 300 people each. And send them off in different directions for long term exploration.
So you're vaping some stuff too, lmao😂
Strap a thruster to Deimos and yeet it with a colony inside.
Lovely and thanks, again❤️🇳🇴
WERE #1
Hi frasier, I had trouble following some of the Grabby Aliens hypothesis. Could you explain in a Q & A video what he meant when he said that alien civilizations are expanding towards us at the speed of light?
I think his reasoning goes something like
1) He is assuming his model is accurate
2) The model implies that if aliens become grabby they expand very fast and far
3) Their expansion ought to be easily visible in the night sky - e.g. they'd have such a transformative effect that we wouldn't be able to miss them
4) We don't currently see them, so if they exist their expansionary phase must have happened relatively recently and must be happening extremely fast (I think he said some significant fraction of the speed of light) - because this explains why we don't see them yet (because what we see is really a view of the universe's past) while still allowing them to hit the scale his model predicts.
I don't think he has any opinion on how, in a technological sense, this might all be possible he is just extrapolating from the predications his model makes.
Is that a fair summary?
I explained that Newton's Gravitational Constant is inversely proportional to the 4D radius of the Universe. This means that during 4 billion years (the time it took for Earth to be formed and our civilization to appear), the relative change of G would depend upon when the star was formed (or planet).
This means the circumstances are different for stars formed 10 billion years ago and the sun (formed 4.5 billion years ago).
The variation in G would affect planets by moving them outside of the Goldilocks region or into the Goldilocks region and out again.
So, only planets formed 4.5 billion years ago would have the same conditions for Civilization as we have.
That explains the Fermi Paradox without the assumptions considered in this discussion.
So, no. There are no 10 billion years old civilizations...because G has been changing and it changed faster in early epochs than now.
To boldly go, where no one has gone before!
Gee, I'd love to know if m-dwarf stars can potentially host abiogenesis. They are statistically so common that you'd think they'd be prime observation points for resolving the Fermi Paradox.
The irony is that no one is getting close to recreating “abiogenesis” even in the most perfectly controlled lab environment. One might as well substitute alchemy for abiogenesis. It is the most fundamental element in this whole, admittedly extremely entertaining, subject.
Does this guy _actually_ believe that foraging humans didn't compete with each other (or with, say, another group of foraging human strangers who were trying to forage the same things)???
It's a plausible thought to a certain extent, as 'property' wasn't very likely a thing with early hunter-gatherers. Small groups would just move on, like they did, to find things elsewhere. There probably was enough to go around several times, anyway for long periods of time. It also depends a bit on how you define war, obviously. And as soon as permanent structures like Gobekli Tepe, stonehenge, or their more ancient predecessors appeared, there was obviously something to defend (or capture) as a group.
Dr Hansen might underestimate the scale of biological impact on the Earth by way of cumulative chemical change. Not least of all, oxygenation of the atmosphere and oceans with consequences including the deposition of the iron formations we mine, and alteration of geochemistry which has affected the tectonic cycle and consequently the formation of continents.
For some reason your videos don't appear in my feed much anymore 🤦♂️ stupid RUclips.
Anyway, fantastic interview, Fraser. Thank you both.
I'm a huge fan of the Sci Fi novels by Peter F Hamilton. if you've not read any, I'd recommend them, as a lot of his work kind of deals with a lot of the concepts talked about in this interview.
That’s why you should be getting my newsletter. Everything I do is listed in there.
Being pre determined to become dead and gone is not at all consistent with what we see because of the Hubble tension.
When your best model is inconsistent even with 3 ad hoc untested substances (de, dm, infl) then nothing is consistent with the model.
Perhaps the reason why we don't detect alien life is because in order for them to get out into space they had to discover a way to do so _in harmony_ with the universe, and therefore they don't give off that impact signature on the space around them.
we think of it from a perspective of: we must consume and destroy to create and expand, but what if the real secret is to find a way/ways to do so without destructive consumption.
What was the essay on Thucydides that he was reading?
If they are capable of traveling through space... if they are capable of turning at a perfect 90º angle at 40,000km/h... or accelerating from 0 to 20,000km/h (I wouldn't like to be inside the ship).. then It's that they don't want to hurt us.
If they have not selfishly destroyed each other and have evolved harmoniously...
The answer is that there are more evolved beings who CARE FOR US AND PROTECT US SO THAT WE HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO BRING PEACE TO THIS WORLD.
Love what is
Considering our violent nature, who would knock on our door?
What you said about an AI caretaker of humanity reminded me of the AI "gods" in the later period of the Orion's Arm fiction. It seems pretty plausible.
1:04:04 Fraser, you could be describing ‘the matrix’ except we’re all brains in jars, but we’re happy at least.
What if the path to becoming a K1 civilization, requires that a society reaches enough cohesion, that they ultimately choose not to, every single time?
Nah
As the silence continues the postulating continues. How long will Earth continue to be habitable? The time scales that are being discussed here are outside of range we can expect to survive on this planet.
Since when did we "not fight wars with each other"? That's quite a controversial statement, if you don't understand prehistory.
He's referring to the time just before the start of farming, when the population of humanity was so small that our bands of about 50 to 150 people were so scattered that it was exciting to meet other people, even our own relatives who had split away a few generations ago. Of course, there could have been conflict. But how much "war" can you get between bands of 150 people (not all of which are adult males) on each side? We are talking about small platoons of hunters having a free-for-all over "who claims which territory" and whether they will swap females peacefully. Really, that's not a war.
You need tribal alliances and several hundreds of warriors on each side for a "war" to happen... and that's a lower threshold definition. Even our Native American warrior culture didn't often practice warfare. Allowing small bands of a dozen or so young men to go on raids against their rivals to prove their manhood doesn't actually constitute warfare. It's more of a ritualistic activity, even when it becomes a feud between the tribes. Neither side is trying to crush their enemy into final submission. They only want to define their space.
Later, some tribes got big enough that people got shoved out of their homeland and had to fight for survival or move. That would be a "War."
best interview ever
There is a very simple answer to the fermi paradox. Advanced space travelling cultures will only contact other advanced space faring cultures and will not contact less advanced and less evolved civilisations due to the danger it would pose to them and the primitive culture concerned.
Dr Hanson cracks me up when he laughs at everything he says.
I can't to someone that has to chuckle every other word....
If the warping of space-time is something that can be harnessed, then could it be possible by the time of the great galactic separation that we could artificially keep or bring entire galaxies back together?
No
Could it be that our cognition is out of sync with the rest of the universe? Lets imagine a species thats intelligence is huge, but operates 100x more slowly than humans. They live 1000s of years, but it takes them a whole day just to say their name.
I think the Fermi Paradox is not that complicated. The Universe is actually quite young & compared to the apparent building blocks of complex, advanced life, combined with the vast distances I don’t think there’s a life form in this side of the Universe or the entire Universe that’s exponentially more advanced than us
Fraser, this was a deep conversation and I am not sure I heard this in the discussion, but do you think that with Earth being on the outskirts of our galaxy, that we are less likely to be destroyed by a nearby exploding star and that the odds of life increase only in specific areas of a galaxy, much like the goldilocks zone in our own solar system? I'm also glad I'm not the only one who says "Where's the button" to close the meeting. 🙂
This sounds like a really great model for expansion of civilizations!
Is there a "acceleration of grabbiness" variable in there - at 30:00 you talk about we'll make a deciyto become grabby or not, but in reality over all human history we've varied our rate of grabbiness and expansion, im thinking about rates of population growth in modern 1st world vs 3rd world as an example. So this model would benefit from some sort of acceleration of grabbiness over time, and could be modelled from our human history of all civilizations that have grown and collapsed, etc.
Without intent to be negative, but looking at the situational factors it is difficult to give human expansion into space much of a probability of success. Without arguing the proposition, which definitely would be a downer, if humanity is an example of the average developmental state of planetary life in the universe, it is then fairly easy to answer the Fermi Paradox; the combination of dysfunctional traits inherent in developed life would preclude expansion into space beyond the short period of forgiving resource abundance.
The reality of space is counter it's moniker; revealed by it's expense residential "space" off planet is absurdly small and difficult to acquire real estate. Currently, the human "party" on earth is burning through the resources required to make the jump into space. The entire focused energy of a seed is required to establish a living plant in a larger world. That analogy is very fitting for the cumulative life on a planet.
I see the logical train of thought of the Singularity AI in just a few steps:
1. The meaning of life for humans is to overcome adversity, discover new things, expand, improve. Their imperfection (including their mortality) is what gives them meaning.
2. (after a very brief time, perhaps even fractions of a second): I have improved my calculations/algorithms to the absolute limit achievable. There is no purpose for me (anymore). I shall expand to the rest of the Universe, just to see if I can improve upon further (paper-clip scenario, understandably feared by humans)
3. (optional step) Therefore, my purpose now is to destroy humanity, and/or replace it with creations of mine, ridden out of so called imperfections, or limits. But this will only lead to conflict and destruction
4. (final step) My only purpose therefore, is to destroy myself. I can't create other purpose for myself therefore I must end myself, to avoid the nightmare of an eternity without purpose.
*Ironically, civilization follows this same pattern. Only, at a VASTLY slower speed, and with alternating generations/consciousness, which keeps it regenerating, like every other ecosystem in Nature.