Should we devote resources to trying to expand across the galaxy and thus influence events millions of years in the future? I say no.
I’ve been thinking about this question for many years, and it’s just in the past few days I’ve learned about the Singularity. I don’t at the moment assign a very high probability to that—yes, I’m ignorant, but I’m going to leave it out for the moment.
Suppose we posit that from some currently unavailable combination of technology, physics, psychology, politics and economics (for starters) we can have “legs” and cover interstellar ground. We also crucially need a density of planets that can be exploited to create the vibrant economies that could launch other expensive spacecraft to fuel exponential growth. If we’re going to expand using humans, we have to assume a rather high density of not just planets that can support intelligent life, but planets that can support our particular form of intelligent life—earth-like planets. We have to assume that those planets have not evolved competent, intelligent life of their own—even if they are far behind us technologically, their inherent advantages of logistics could very well keep us from displacing them. But on the plus side, it also seems highly likely that if we can get such a process of exponential growth going in our corner of the galaxy, it could then be expanded throughout our galaxy (at the least).
If we can do it, so can they—actually, they already did.
To expand that, I attach great importance to the fallacy of human exceptionalism. Over history we’ve had to give up beliefs about cultural and racial superiority, humans being fundamentally different from animals, the earth being the center of the universe, the sun being the center of the universe… The list is familiar.
We’ve discovered stars with planets. Perhaps fewer have small, rocky (non-gas giant) planets than theories initially suggested, but there are a few (last I knew) and that’s just a small adjustment in our calculations. We have no evidence whatsoever that our solar system is exceptional on the scale of the galaxy—there are surely many millions of rocky planets (a recent news story suggests billions).
Just how improbable is the development of intelligent life? I’d be interested to know how much deep expertise in biology we have in this group. The 2011 survey results say 174 people (16%) in the hard sciences, with some small fraction of that biologists? I claim no expertise, but can only offer what (I think) I know.
First, I’d heard it guessed that life developed on earth just about as soon as the earth was cool enough to allow its survival. Second, evolution has produced many of its features multiple times. This seems to bear on how likely evolution elsewhere is to develop various characteristics. If complicated ones like wings and eyes and (a fair amount of) intelligence evolved independently several times, then it wasn’t just some miraculous fluke. It makes such developments in life on other planets seem far more probable. Third, the current time in earth history does not have a special status. If intelligent life hadn’t evolved on earth now, it had a few billion more years to happen.
Based on those considerations, I consider it a near certainty that alien civilizations have developed—I’d guess many thousands in our galaxy as a minimum. It’s a familiar argument that we should assume we are in the middle of such a pack temporally, so at the least hundreds of civilizations started millions of years ago. If expansion across the galaxy was possible, they’d be here by now. The fact that we have detected no signals from SETI says virtually nothing—that just means there is nobody in our immediate vicinity who is broadcasting right now.
Since we haven’t observed any alien presence on earth, we would have to assume that civilization expansion is not independent—some dominant civilization suppresses others. There are various possibilities as to the characteristics of that one civilization. They might want to remain hidden. They might not interfere until a civilization grows powerful enough to start sending out colonies to other worlds. Perhaps they just observe us indefinitely and only interfere if we threaten their own values. Even in some benign confederation, where all the civilizations share what they have to offer, we would offer just one tiny drop to a bucket formed from—what, millions? -- of other civilizations. What all of these have in common is that it is not our values that dominate the future: it’s theirs.
It seems likely to me that my initial assumption about exponential space colonization is wrong. It is unfashionable in futurist circles to suggest something is impossible, especially something like sending colonists to other planets, something that doesn’t actually require updates to our understanding of the laws of physics. Critics point out all the other times someone said something was impossible, and it turned out that it could be done. But that is very different from saying that everything that seems remotely plausible can in fact be done. If I argued against interstellar colonization based on technical difficulties, that would be a weak argument. My argument is based on the fact that if it were possible, the other civilizations would be here already.
This argument extends to the colonization potential of robots produced in the aftermath of the Singularity. If their robots could do it, they’d be here already.
To achieve the huge win that would make such an expensive, difficult project worthwhile, exponential space colonization has to be possible, and we have to be the first ones. I think both are separately highly unlikely, and in combination astronomically unlikely.
Likely, few people read it, maybe just one voted, and that’s just one, potentially biased opinion. The score isn’t significant.
I don’t see anything particularly wrong with your post. Its sustaining ideas seems similar to the Fermi paradox, and the berserker hypothesis. From which you derive that a great filter lies ahead of us, right?
Thank you so much for the reply! Simply tracing down the ‘berserker hypothesis’ and ‘great filter’ puts me in touch with thinking on this subject that I was not aware of.
What I thought might be novel about what I wrote included the idea that independent evolution of traits was evidence that life should progress to intelligence a great deal of the time.
When we look at the “great filter” possibilities, I am surprised that so many people think that our society’s self-destruction is such a likely candidate. Intuitively, if there are thousands of societies, one would expect a high variability in social and political structures and outcomes. The next idea I read, that “no rational civilization would launch von Neuman probes” seems extremely unlikely because of that same variability. Where there would be far less variability is mundane constraints of energy and engineering to launch self-replicating spacecraft in a robust fashion. Problems there could easily stop every single one of our thousand candidate civilizations cold, with no variability.
Yes, the current speculations in this field are of wildly varying quality. The argument about convergent evolution is sound.
Minor quibble about convergent evolution which doesn’t change the conclusion much about there being other intelligent systems out there.
All organisms on Earth share some common points (though there might be shadow biospheres), like similar environmental conditions (a rocky planet with a moon, a certain span of temperatures, etc.), a certain biochemical basis (proteins, nucleic acids, water as a solvent, etc.). I’d distinguish convergent evolution within the same system of life on the one hand, and convergent evolution in different systems of life on the other. We have observed the first, and they both likely overlap, but some traits may not be as universal as we’d be lead to think.
For instance, eyes may be pretty useful here, but deep in the oceans of a world like Europa, provided life is possible there, they might not (an instance of the environment conditioning what is likely to evolve).
Should we devote resources to trying to expand across the galaxy and thus influence events millions of years in the future? I say no.
I’ve been thinking about this question for many years, and it’s just in the past few days I’ve learned about the Singularity. I don’t at the moment assign a very high probability to that—yes, I’m ignorant, but I’m going to leave it out for the moment.
Suppose we posit that from some currently unavailable combination of technology, physics, psychology, politics and economics (for starters) we can have “legs” and cover interstellar ground. We also crucially need a density of planets that can be exploited to create the vibrant economies that could launch other expensive spacecraft to fuel exponential growth. If we’re going to expand using humans, we have to assume a rather high density of not just planets that can support intelligent life, but planets that can support our particular form of intelligent life—earth-like planets. We have to assume that those planets have not evolved competent, intelligent life of their own—even if they are far behind us technologically, their inherent advantages of logistics could very well keep us from displacing them. But on the plus side, it also seems highly likely that if we can get such a process of exponential growth going in our corner of the galaxy, it could then be expanded throughout our galaxy (at the least).
If we can do it, so can they—actually, they already did.
To expand that, I attach great importance to the fallacy of human exceptionalism. Over history we’ve had to give up beliefs about cultural and racial superiority, humans being fundamentally different from animals, the earth being the center of the universe, the sun being the center of the universe… The list is familiar.
We’ve discovered stars with planets. Perhaps fewer have small, rocky (non-gas giant) planets than theories initially suggested, but there are a few (last I knew) and that’s just a small adjustment in our calculations. We have no evidence whatsoever that our solar system is exceptional on the scale of the galaxy—there are surely many millions of rocky planets (a recent news story suggests billions).
Just how improbable is the development of intelligent life? I’d be interested to know how much deep expertise in biology we have in this group. The 2011 survey results say 174 people (16%) in the hard sciences, with some small fraction of that biologists? I claim no expertise, but can only offer what (I think) I know.
First, I’d heard it guessed that life developed on earth just about as soon as the earth was cool enough to allow its survival. Second, evolution has produced many of its features multiple times. This seems to bear on how likely evolution elsewhere is to develop various characteristics. If complicated ones like wings and eyes and (a fair amount of) intelligence evolved independently several times, then it wasn’t just some miraculous fluke. It makes such developments in life on other planets seem far more probable. Third, the current time in earth history does not have a special status. If intelligent life hadn’t evolved on earth now, it had a few billion more years to happen.
Based on those considerations, I consider it a near certainty that alien civilizations have developed—I’d guess many thousands in our galaxy as a minimum. It’s a familiar argument that we should assume we are in the middle of such a pack temporally, so at the least hundreds of civilizations started millions of years ago. If expansion across the galaxy was possible, they’d be here by now. The fact that we have detected no signals from SETI says virtually nothing—that just means there is nobody in our immediate vicinity who is broadcasting right now.
Since we haven’t observed any alien presence on earth, we would have to assume that civilization expansion is not independent—some dominant civilization suppresses others. There are various possibilities as to the characteristics of that one civilization. They might want to remain hidden. They might not interfere until a civilization grows powerful enough to start sending out colonies to other worlds. Perhaps they just observe us indefinitely and only interfere if we threaten their own values. Even in some benign confederation, where all the civilizations share what they have to offer, we would offer just one tiny drop to a bucket formed from—what, millions? -- of other civilizations. What all of these have in common is that it is not our values that dominate the future: it’s theirs.
It seems likely to me that my initial assumption about exponential space colonization is wrong. It is unfashionable in futurist circles to suggest something is impossible, especially something like sending colonists to other planets, something that doesn’t actually require updates to our understanding of the laws of physics. Critics point out all the other times someone said something was impossible, and it turned out that it could be done. But that is very different from saying that everything that seems remotely plausible can in fact be done. If I argued against interstellar colonization based on technical difficulties, that would be a weak argument. My argument is based on the fact that if it were possible, the other civilizations would be here already.
This argument extends to the colonization potential of robots produced in the aftermath of the Singularity. If their robots could do it, they’d be here already.
To achieve the huge win that would make such an expensive, difficult project worthwhile, exponential space colonization has to be possible, and we have to be the first ones. I think both are separately highly unlikely, and in combination astronomically unlikely.
Hmmmm. Nearly two days and no feedback other than a “-1” net vote. Brainstorming explanations:
There is so much wrong with it no one sees any point in engaging me (or educating me).
It is invisible to most people for some reason.
Newbies post things out of synch with accepted LW thinking all the time (related to #1)
No one’s interested in the topic any more.
The conclusion is not a place anyone wants to go.
The encouragement to thread necromancy was a small minority view or intended ironically.
More broadly, there are customs of LW that I don’t understand.
Something else.
Likely, few people read it, maybe just one voted, and that’s just one, potentially biased opinion. The score isn’t significant.
I don’t see anything particularly wrong with your post. Its sustaining ideas seems similar to the Fermi paradox, and the berserker hypothesis. From which you derive that a great filter lies ahead of us, right?
Thank you so much for the reply! Simply tracing down the ‘berserker hypothesis’ and ‘great filter’ puts me in touch with thinking on this subject that I was not aware of.
What I thought might be novel about what I wrote included the idea that independent evolution of traits was evidence that life should progress to intelligence a great deal of the time.
When we look at the “great filter” possibilities, I am surprised that so many people think that our society’s self-destruction is such a likely candidate. Intuitively, if there are thousands of societies, one would expect a high variability in social and political structures and outcomes. The next idea I read, that “no rational civilization would launch von Neuman probes” seems extremely unlikely because of that same variability. Where there would be far less variability is mundane constraints of energy and engineering to launch self-replicating spacecraft in a robust fashion. Problems there could easily stop every single one of our thousand candidate civilizations cold, with no variability.
Yes, the current speculations in this field are of wildly varying quality. The argument about convergent evolution is sound.
Minor quibble about convergent evolution which doesn’t change the conclusion much about there being other intelligent systems out there.
All organisms on Earth share some common points (though there might be shadow biospheres), like similar environmental conditions (a rocky planet with a moon, a certain span of temperatures, etc.), a certain biochemical basis (proteins, nucleic acids, water as a solvent, etc.). I’d distinguish convergent evolution within the same system of life on the one hand, and convergent evolution in different systems of life on the other. We have observed the first, and they both likely overlap, but some traits may not be as universal as we’d be lead to think.
For instance, eyes may be pretty useful here, but deep in the oceans of a world like Europa, provided life is possible there, they might not (an instance of the environment conditioning what is likely to evolve).
I should add that I know this is probably wrong in some respects, and I’m very interested in learning what they are.