Given the enormous number of independent chances/pathways for life to have evolved in this galaxy outside of earth, the prior on us being alone is very low. It’s only then reasonable to conclude that we are alone if one is extraordinarily confident on the future trajectory of alien civilizations, and that it necessarily results in visible megastructures which look very different from known/suspected natural stellar systems. That is what a very strong prior does, it overcomes other evidence (or lack thereof).
But given that advanced life is most likely some form of advanced computation, and advanced future computational systems will necessarily be extremely cold and dark, it does not seem reasonable to update so strongly on lack of visible megastructures.
And otherwise the evidence we have (history of UFO sightings) is actually quite compatible with advanced alien civs.
Hopefully the James Webb will eventually find (or not find) at least a few planets with bio-compatible atmosphere signatures (although of course there will always be other explanations, and these will always continue to be more popular for various reasons until hard reproducible evidence is publicized). But if we instead find 0 bio-compatible amtospheres out of a sample of at least a few hundred candidates, that would be more important evidence against the copernican principle than lack of visible megastructures.
Spacefaring aliens are post-AGI, and have post-AGI kind of tech even if they successfully prevented unaligned AGIs from taking over, as they had enough time since then to develop, so they might as well just be AGIs. At that point visible UFOs no longer make sense. If we have been reached but not eliminated as observers, that can only be a moral judgement, and we are either completely left alone or have been put in a simulation, in which case occasional UFO sightings don’t seem like an optimal feature of the outcome.
Visible megastructures seem a priori more likely than visible UFOs, in the scenario where we are left alone in the physical world, since it’s probably too costly to hide evidence of development elsewhere in the world without violating some non-interference moral code that also prevents us from being put in a simulation or wiped out or being contacted (at this stage of our development). But it’s trivial to avoid visible UFOs, even with total surveillance, if competent alien AGIs make sure it’s not noticed. And depending on the moral code of non-interference, it’s similarly trivial to fake all observations even outside a simulation.
What’s left are weird cases of permanently crippled development, with incompetent AGIs and low tech, which should be sought in our own possible futures to understand their nature. And UFO sightings being total nonsense.
advanced future computational systems will necessarily be extremely cold and dark
The stars are burning away useful resources, it’s likely possible to do better than leaving them alone, by either deconstructing them or capturing energy output. We observe that stars have been left alone. So either all observations are fake, or there is no megastructure building capability out there.
and we are either completely left alone or have been put in a simulation, in which case occasional UFO sightings don’t seem like an optimal feature of the outcome.
Agreed. A way of using our matter (the earth) for something else, without killing us.
So I’ve been thinking about that. For any simulator, there are things they do and don’t care about capturing accurately in the simulation. I’d guess that the simulation has a lot to do with whether we hold to the reciprocal kind-colonization pacts that they’re committed to themselves. For that, it’s important that the “we” is preserved, we have to be allowed to develop without any major interventions, so that we self-actualize, so that the thing being tested is really us. There may be interventions that they can make that wouldn’t interfere with the integrity of the test, that would actually enhance its accuracy, reduce the random noise of a perfectly natural history.
I don’t have an idea of what that would look like. It’s not obvious to me that it would look like UFOs. I can tell a story where it does, but it’s weak so far: To induce us to consider the possibility that our neighbors are already here, without confirming it (or even, before disconfirming it later on (“ah, turns out it was all a ridiculously implausible propulsion research program all along, nothing to see here”)). And maybe that leads us to… no. I shouldn’t go on, today. I just don’t understand what this noise-reduction means and how it should work. I need to think about that more.
You are making strong unwarranted assumptions about far future tech. Advanced computers are most likely quantum reversible and are thus not energy constrained—they are mostly mass and temperature constrained. Stars may not be very useful.
Is there writing about that? Last time I thought deeply about reversible computing, it didn’t seem like it was going to be useful for really anything that we care about.
I’ll put it this way.. if you look at almost any subroutine in a real program, it consists of taking a large set of inputs and reducing them to a smaller output. In a reversible computer, iirc, the outputs have to be as big as the inputs, informationally (yeah that sounds about right). So you have to be throwing out a whole lot of useless outputs to keep the info balanced, that’s what you have to do to maintain reversibility, but that’s not really different to producing entropy. I expect life and life-like patterns to have that quality, as computations. Life, by nature, is inextricable from time, but the most precise reductions of the forward motion of time is that it consists of the increase of entropy, or something like that.
Simulation timesteps compute a new similar size model state from previous, and since physics is reversible simulations tend to be roughly reversible as well. And more generally you can balance entropy producing compression with entropy consuming generation/sampling.
Even if stars only make up a small fraction of the matter in the universe, it’s still matter, they’d still probably have something they’d prefer to do with it than this. I’m not really sure what kind of value system (that’s also power-seeking enough to exert control over a broad chunk of the universe) could justify leaving it fallow.
Stars consist mostly of low value hydrogen/helium, but left to their own devices they cook that fuel into higher value heavier elements.
But anyway that is mostly irrelevant—the big picture issue is whether future civs transcend vs expand. The current trajectory of civilization is exponential, and continuing that trajectory requires transcension. Spatial expansion allows for only weak quadratic growth.
Hmm makes sense if you really don’t care about energy. But how much energy will they need, in the end, to reorganize all of that matter?
I don’t think there’s going to be a tradeoff between expansion and transcension for most agents within each civ, or most civs (let alone all agents in almost all civs). If transcension increases the value of any given patch of space by s^t, and you get more space from expansion at s*t^3, well, the two policies are nonexpansion: 2tc vs expansion: 2tt3 :/ there’s no contest. If it’s not value per region of space, if one quantity became negligible relative to the other, that value of expansion is still bigger than the cost of building one self-replicating expansion probe (which is even more negligible), so they do that.
So the EV of continuing spacial expansion is still positive. Unless you can argue that the countervailing value of leaving the stars fallow grows in proportion to the transcension in some way. It sorta looks that way with humans (some sort of moral term resembling diminishing gains on resources, and a love of history and its artifacts (fallow planets) that grows with population size?), but it could go either way.
Man if it’s possible to rearrange hot matter into truly perpetual reversible simulations, that wouldn’t just explain weird aliens, it would also explain the anthropic binding mystery, it would redeem the Teeming Consortium story.
Given the enormous number of independent chances/pathways for life to have evolved in this galaxy outside of earth, the prior on us being alone is very low. It’s only then reasonable to conclude that we are alone if one is extraordinarily confident on the future trajectory of alien civilizations, and that it necessarily results in visible megastructures which look very different from known/suspected natural stellar systems. That is what a very strong prior does, it overcomes other evidence (or lack thereof).
But given that advanced life is most likely some form of advanced computation, and advanced future computational systems will necessarily be extremely cold and dark, it does not seem reasonable to update so strongly on lack of visible megastructures.
And otherwise the evidence we have (history of UFO sightings) is actually quite compatible with advanced alien civs.
Hopefully the James Webb will eventually find (or not find) at least a few planets with bio-compatible atmosphere signatures (although of course there will always be other explanations, and these will always continue to be more popular for various reasons until hard reproducible evidence is publicized). But if we instead find 0 bio-compatible amtospheres out of a sample of at least a few hundred candidates, that would be more important evidence against the copernican principle than lack of visible megastructures.
Spacefaring aliens are post-AGI, and have post-AGI kind of tech even if they successfully prevented unaligned AGIs from taking over, as they had enough time since then to develop, so they might as well just be AGIs. At that point visible UFOs no longer make sense. If we have been reached but not eliminated as observers, that can only be a moral judgement, and we are either completely left alone or have been put in a simulation, in which case occasional UFO sightings don’t seem like an optimal feature of the outcome.
Visible megastructures seem a priori more likely than visible UFOs, in the scenario where we are left alone in the physical world, since it’s probably too costly to hide evidence of development elsewhere in the world without violating some non-interference moral code that also prevents us from being put in a simulation or wiped out or being contacted (at this stage of our development). But it’s trivial to avoid visible UFOs, even with total surveillance, if competent alien AGIs make sure it’s not noticed. And depending on the moral code of non-interference, it’s similarly trivial to fake all observations even outside a simulation.
What’s left are weird cases of permanently crippled development, with incompetent AGIs and low tech, which should be sought in our own possible futures to understand their nature. And UFO sightings being total nonsense.
The stars are burning away useful resources, it’s likely possible to do better than leaving them alone, by either deconstructing them or capturing energy output. We observe that stars have been left alone. So either all observations are fake, or there is no megastructure building capability out there.
Agreed. A way of using our matter (the earth) for something else, without killing us.
So I’ve been thinking about that. For any simulator, there are things they do and don’t care about capturing accurately in the simulation. I’d guess that the simulation has a lot to do with whether we hold to the reciprocal kind-colonization pacts that they’re committed to themselves. For that, it’s important that the “we” is preserved, we have to be allowed to develop without any major interventions, so that we self-actualize, so that the thing being tested is really us.
There may be interventions that they can make that wouldn’t interfere with the integrity of the test, that would actually enhance its accuracy, reduce the random noise of a perfectly natural history.
I don’t have an idea of what that would look like. It’s not obvious to me that it would look like UFOs. I can tell a story where it does, but it’s weak so far: To induce us to consider the possibility that our neighbors are already here, without confirming it (or even, before disconfirming it later on (“ah, turns out it was all a ridiculously implausible propulsion research program all along, nothing to see here”)).
And maybe that leads us to… no. I shouldn’t go on, today. I just don’t understand what this noise-reduction means and how it should work. I need to think about that more.
You are making strong unwarranted assumptions about far future tech. Advanced computers are most likely quantum reversible and are thus not energy constrained—they are mostly mass and temperature constrained. Stars may not be very useful.
Is there writing about that? Last time I thought deeply about reversible computing, it didn’t seem like it was going to be useful for really anything that we care about.
I’ll put it this way.. if you look at almost any subroutine in a real program, it consists of taking a large set of inputs and reducing them to a smaller output. In a reversible computer, iirc, the outputs have to be as big as the inputs, informationally (yeah that sounds about right). So you have to be throwing out a whole lot of useless outputs to keep the info balanced, that’s what you have to do to maintain reversibility, but that’s not really different to producing entropy. I expect life and life-like patterns to have that quality, as computations. Life, by nature, is inextricable from time, but the most precise reductions of the forward motion of time is that it consists of the increase of entropy, or something like that.
Simulation timesteps compute a new similar size model state from previous, and since physics is reversible simulations tend to be roughly reversible as well. And more generally you can balance entropy producing compression with entropy consuming generation/sampling.
Even if stars only make up a small fraction of the matter in the universe, it’s still matter, they’d still probably have something they’d prefer to do with it than this. I’m not really sure what kind of value system (that’s also power-seeking enough to exert control over a broad chunk of the universe) could justify leaving it fallow.
Stars consist mostly of low value hydrogen/helium, but left to their own devices they cook that fuel into higher value heavier elements.
But anyway that is mostly irrelevant—the big picture issue is whether future civs transcend vs expand. The current trajectory of civilization is exponential, and continuing that trajectory requires transcension. Spatial expansion allows for only weak quadratic growth.
Hmm makes sense if you really don’t care about energy. But how much energy will they need, in the end, to reorganize all of that matter?
I don’t think there’s going to be a tradeoff between expansion and transcension for most agents within each civ, or most civs (let alone all agents in almost all civs). If transcension increases the value of any given patch of space by s^t, and you get more space from expansion at s*t^3, well, the two policies are nonexpansion: 2tc vs expansion: 2tt3 :/ there’s no contest.
If it’s not value per region of space, if one quantity became negligible relative to the other, that value of expansion is still bigger than the cost of building one self-replicating expansion probe (which is even more negligible), so they do that.
So the EV of continuing spacial expansion is still positive. Unless you can argue that the countervailing value of leaving the stars fallow grows in proportion to the transcension in some way. It sorta looks that way with humans (some sort of moral term resembling diminishing gains on resources, and a love of history and its artifacts (fallow planets) that grows with population size?), but it could go either way.
Man if it’s possible to rearrange hot matter into truly perpetual reversible simulations, that wouldn’t just explain weird aliens, it would also explain the anthropic binding mystery, it would redeem the Teeming Consortium story.