Unimaginably large amounts of theory can often compensate for small amounts of missing empirical data. I can imagine the possibility that all of our current observations truly underdetermine facts about the universe’s future large-scale evolution, but it wouldn’t be my default guess.
For what it’s worth, my intuition agrees that any superintelligence, even if using an aestivation strategy, would leave behind some sort of easily visible side effects, and that there aren’t actually any aestivating aliens out there.
I think an argument could be made that they have left subtle visible effects, and we just haven’t been able to reach consensus that that’s what it is, and one of these days we’re going to correlate the universe’s contents, and when we do, we’re going to be a bit upset.
We don’t seem to be sure what the deal was with oumuamua, and we’re constantly getting reports of what look like alien probes on earth, but we (at least, whatever epistemic network I’m in) can only shrug and say “These things usually aren’t aliens.”
Unimaginably large amounts of theory can often compensate for small amounts of missing empirical data. I can imagine the possibility that all of our current observations truly underdetermine facts about the universe’s future large-scale evolution, but it wouldn’t be my default guess.
For what it’s worth, my intuition agrees that any superintelligence, even if using an aestivation strategy, would leave behind some sort of easily visible side effects, and that there aren’t actually any aestivating aliens out there.
I think an argument could be made that they have left subtle visible effects, and we just haven’t been able to reach consensus that that’s what it is, and one of these days we’re going to correlate the universe’s contents, and when we do, we’re going to be a bit upset.
We don’t seem to be sure what the deal was with oumuamua, and we’re constantly getting reports of what look like alien probes on earth, but we (at least, whatever epistemic network I’m in) can only shrug and say “These things usually aren’t aliens.”