I think the really significant term in the Drake equation is the question of time overlap between our civilization and any civilizations in other star systems.
In other words, the likelihood that they either lived before or (will live) after us is overwhelming, since the time scale of the universe is so vast compared to the time scale (with our one known example) of a civilization.
Our timeline is like the blink of an eye, compared to the age of the universe. Very unlikely that nearby blinks would happen at exactly the same time, even with a 11,000+ multiplier.
As far as I remember, the likelihood of a technological civilization forming before us is rather small.
Basically we live in the goldilocks zone of our galaxy.
Stars further towards the center are being constantly bombarded by types of radiation that make the formation of structured self-replicators almost impossible.Entropy rules.
Stars further towards the rim have not yet gone through enough generations to produce the abundant heavier elements needed.
We live in the zone that is both old enough and stable enough for technologically adept life to thrive, and we turned up on the scene about as early as we could.
There are almost endless modes where life could develop in much more different and harsher conditions. More radiation? Well stronger magnetic fields for those. Too much space debris randomly popping into star systems? Have a big vacuum cleaner like Jupiter or two (or five). Not that common but if you have 500 billion stars many unprobable things can and will happen.
Life as we see here on Earth is extremely adaptable. Give it harsh environment, and unless its too much immediately it will adapt and actually take advantage out of it (ie too much radiation? well we can mutate to our ideal desired form even quicker).
Also, 1 billion years doesn't mean much in this cosmic scale. But imagine if civilization like ours had that much headstart. Well, you can't imagine, and neither can I in same way homo erectus couldn't imagine CERN particle accelerator or black holes.
Homo Erectus takes us back around 100 million years. A billion years gets us to very simple multicellular life which can't do imagination at all. Or logic. Or thinking. Or creativity. Or much of anything else.
So... a billion year old civ is going to have very fundamental abilities which are completely beyond our comprehension.
It's like Dunning Kruger on a cosmic scale. Except that with Dunning Kruger there's usually some potential to learn a way out of ignorance.
Here there isn't. Not only can we not do it, or understand why we need to do it, we can't see - never mind reach - the first rung of it.
>Homo Erectus takes us back around 100 million years.
Huh? Where did you get that crazy number? 100M years ago was the age of the dinosaurs. Homo erectus was around somewhere between 250K and 1.6M years ago.
> So... a billion year old civ is going to have very fundamental abilities which are completely beyond our comprehension.
Maybe not. There's no evidence that species can continually adapt and evolve to higher levels of intelligence. Humans are already hitting limits for how much we can think, figure out, etc.
But by that same token, maybe so. Humans aren't exactly the cream of the crop when it comes to higher critical thinking and emotional intelligence.
Is there any biological research that takes a look at a single or sequence of species maintaining civilizations lasting x amount of years?
> Humans are already hitting limits for how much we can think, figure out, etc.
There is zero evidence of this.
What would that mean?
Once our intelligence encompassed communication then it began growing culturally. I.e. we are able to treat math and engineering as no biggies, despite humans needing millennia to realize "nothing" could be a number called "zero".
It's fair to say the 21st century shows no signs of intelligence slowing down. We keep finding ways to think more simply but more effectively.
Natural evolution may have its limits, but we don't yet know how much we can improve by artificial means.
We will have the technology to alter the DNA to increase our intelligence significantly. There are limits, but I don't think it is likely that human beings are at the peak of what is biological possible.
- When we reach the biological limit, we may extend ourselves by merging with technology. Our brains might be connected to a computing device that amplifies our capabilities. It may be so seamless that when answering a question, you won't notice if the knowledge was stored in your physical brain or retrieved from a central archive.
>- When we reach the biological limit, we may extend ourselves by merging with technology.
In the near term, I just wish they'd figure out how to make better mechanical parts for humans. Our natural joints suck, particularly knees and ankles. It really shouldn't be that hard to make mechanical replacements for various parts of the human body.
> and we turned up on the scene about as early as we could.
> So we are probably just one of the first.
Those two sentences don't really mix. We have evidence that points to life forming basically immediately once the conditions are right. That means that for us to be the first, nowhere else in the galaxy and universe could have had the conditions. That just seems incredibly unlikely. Even in our own Solar System, other bodies like Mars had the conditions for life before Earth did.
On top of that, Earth itself had the potential for intelligent life long before humans came around. But instead of evolving some overgrown monkeys, it evolved some overgrown birds who were too selfish and shortsighted to work together and develop a space program and watch out for large asteroids. They were mostly wiped out because of this, and it took 65 million years for another selfish and shortsighted group of animals to evolve and become dominant. Unlike the last ones, they developed a space program, but it's not really enough to handle threatening asteroids yet, but they're busy destroying themselves and their environment in other ways, so it may be moot. It might take Earth 3 tries to finally evolve a sentient species that becomes a spacefaring civilization.
With you until the last sentence. Why would the "third try" not just be dinosaurs again? Same for the 4th, 5th an subsequent "attempts". The fact that the second try got further than the first does not mean that the 3rd will get further than the second.
In fact, given that most of the easily accessible coal and oil deposits will have been used up it might even be much more difficult for a subsequent species to get as far as humanity has. (Although that might be balanced a bit by lots of the metal ore being pre-mined and near the surface)
Depends. Most of the current coal deposits were from before fungi and bacteria evolved the ability to digest lignins and similar compounds. Now that they can do that, no more (or at least much less) coal deposits are being created.
Orcas very likely have human adjacent intelligence and evolved earlier than humans. They arrived several to tens of million years before humans, as far as I can tell. Orcas are simply constrained by their environment as far as technological development goes.
Basically, as my understanding goes, life is effectively as old as the Earth is. As soon as it cooled down after forming and had liquid oceans, life started, which happened just a few hundred million years after Earth formed.
There is the book Every Life is on Fire as well, describing how life began to dissipate heat in the environment of molecules in water being heated. That seems to imply life will quickly start in such conditions. (Note: I don't strongly recommend the book, as it has a lot of religious stuff in it and honestly isn't that well written, and I have mainly learned about the author's theory elsewhere.)
We don't really have any way to know that. Considering that there may be as many stars in the sky as grains of sand on Earth, there are many many unknowns.
For another example we don't know for sure if our universe is the only one and it's entirely possible that everything that could ever happen plays out in real time across and infinite number of universes. We don't have any way to physically measure that possibility yet. We only have mathematical theories.
Similar to how Copernicus proposed the heliocentric model, maybe our universe is not even the center of existence?
Astrophysicists tell us that star formation will continue for 100 trillion years.
We are indeed among the first simply because of the sheer amount of time left ahead of us vs. behind us. It's basic math. We are at 0.014% of the expected duration of this universe.
All those stars you see in the night sky? That’s an astronomical waste of energy. No technological energy limited civilization would let that waste continue, entirely unhindered.
The fact that we don’t see the light of stars, or whole galaxies replaced by dim infrared waste heat emissions means either (1) new physics will point to free energy solutions that circumvent thermodynamic laws [unlikely], or (2) we are the first.
We may not have the capability to build a Dyson cloud around our own star (yet), but we do already have the technology. You could do so with 21st century tech, and the ROI would be positive.
The really advanced civilizations developed their technology just enough so they could build a really safe and reliable Matrix to live out their lives in.
They would still consume their local stars to extract and store the energy so their matrix can survive for trillions of years, rather than a few million or billion.
1. disassembling the stars to make them live a thousand times longer
2. it only takes one expansionist civilisation seeking interstellar exponential growth — even if 99.9% of civilisations are quiet, that's just 3 digits of the 22-digit number of stars in the observable universe.
> disassembling the stars to make them live a thousand times longer
Why would they do that when there are insane amounts of start with billions of years of life ahead of them. What purpose would that serve at this point in time?
Already today, having passed peak-child a few years ago, we can see that there are futures possible where humanity doesn't grow. I.e. humanity might be fine advancing with a fixed amount of power.
In that case, the stars are not 'waste'.
Historically, this idea of growth as method for advance is only a few centuries old. It's not hard to see its end as efficiency keeps increasing.
Or just maybe civilizations advanced enough for Kardyshev level 2 engineering feel no need for exponential expansion. Fermi paradox is essentially Malthusianism extended to outer space.
If nothing else, eventually civilizations are confronted by questions (in math, say) that can only be solved by extremely large amounts of computation. We know there must ultimately be succinctly stateable problems that cannot be solved easily; this follows from the undecidability of math.
It could well be that harnessing the energy of one star is sufficient for most of that. This is very hard to detect for an observer.
Going K3 to 100 billion stars of the galaxy "only" gives you a 10^11 constant factor speedup at enormous expense and with Amdahl's penalty at galactic scales.
The other part of that overlap is whether they are using radio signals. I think a lot about the fact that there may very well be other ways of wireless signal transmission that don’t require radio (gravitational waves are one example though I’m not sure if I would expect those to be used for data transmission).
200 years ago no one knew radio communications were possible. We still don’t understand quantum entanglement. Our understanding of physics, while more advanced than the past, is still clearly limited. We may find that there are better ways than radio to transmit data, and this could explain why our radio surveys have so far not detected extraterrestrial data packets (as far as we can tell).
Even for radio we went from blasting megawatts into space to keeping a lot of it in the atmosphere. We ourselves are proof that radio's a poor way to detect aliens and our reduction in radio emissions was a natural progression of our technology, not an attempt to hide.
What's more telling for those in the neighborhood is the strange amounts of O2 in our atmosphere's spectral lines. That came to be long before us, it will persist long beyond us and it's a clear indicator of a non-geological process that might intrigue aliens.
Spectral lines may be telling about conditions suitable for certain type of life. But as per some theories life itself may be quite abundant in universe, but mostly primitive equivalents of stromatolites so it may not be that interesting for aliens to keep checking every single planet for such life in whole galaxy, especially if speed of light is absolute speed barrier.
One other thing I came up with on a long evening walk recently was to check for gravity fields. If you have all bigger pieces of matter mapped well within galaxy, and you grok all physical laws there are, you should be able to predict movements and gravity fields for billions of years with high precision. Kind of make a complex checksum of given galaxy. If this changes for no predicted reason, bingo you just have a very strong candidate of life evolving enough to escape its planet and start moving big chunks of matter around (think big asteroids or changing orbit of planet slightly to ie counter some natural catastrophe like greenhouse effect / ice age, or living near slowly dying star).
Obviously this is way ahead of us and maybe even not possible, just a fun thought. But if you start space mining company by any chance in the future, please don't move matter around too much.
Hmm it's a nice idea but gravity is such a weak force that it seems like it would be hard to move significant enough bits of matter around for it to be detectable. If they were going around annihilating whole stars and clusters then maybe.
Or even if there isn’t new physics for wireless transmission, it seems likely that a civilization living on a single planet would keep increasing the efficiency of their communications until very little radio leaks out.
Even further, advances in coding schemes make data look increasingly like noise to the outside observer. Think of the readability of a text file versus the same file after zip compression
> In other words, the likelihood that they either lived before or (will live) after us is overwhelming, since the time scale of the universe is so vast
Not sure this logic makes a whole lot of sense.
Imagine a universe similar to ours, but with a lifetime cut short by a doomsday device. Would you expect any difference in the likelihood that mirror humanity coincides with another alien civilisation?
Independent of other factors, adding more time doesn't really reduce the number of civilisations existing at any one time, it gives more time for civilisations to emerge.
Your logic suggests there is a fixed number of civilisations to distribute evenly across the lifetime of the universe. Now, the number of civilisations may be limited by usable energy for life to consume rather than time - but in that case I'd expect civilisations to cluster at the beginning of time when entropy is low.
Edit: in fact Drake didn't actually include any term for age of the universe in his equation.
I think it reduces the lower bound for how many civilisations we'd expect to exist, from our N=1 example? 1 civilisation in (say) 1 million years would suggest they're more common than 1 civilisation in 13.7 billion years?
But I think I was imprecise with my language. By "age" I meant the total lifetime of the universe as a place with planets capable of supporting life, rather than the amount of time between the big bang and now.
> I think the really significant term in the Drake equation is the question of time overlap between our civilization and any civilizations in other star systems.
universe begins
0.1 Gy
first stars
9 Gy
our solar system begins
0.5 Gy or less
early life
3.5 Gy
complex, multicellular, macroscopic life
0.5 Gy
sentient, intelligent life
I think the important delays are the 9 Gy and the 3.5 Gy. (Gy = billion years)
9 Gy: After first stars, how many generations do you need of large stars, synthesizing heavy elements, going supernova and shooting the heavy elements around, contributing to the condensation of new stars (now with some heavy elements to begin with), until you cal form solar systems and planets like ours, with enough iron and heavier elements to make life chemically possible. Do you need to wait this full 9 billion years, before planets with the chemical composition of Earth appear, or did they already appear sooner?
3.5 Gy: How long does it "usually" take from early microbial life, for evolution to develop complex multicellular life? In our case it took 3.5 billion years, but are we among the fastest, or the slowest?
Reminds me of the failing of the k-nearest neighbor algorithm. It works extremely well in low dimensionality, but given high dimensionality, its astoundingly bad. As you scale up the space and number of dimensions, the distances between individual chunks of data gets so large its hard to draw meaningful conclusions.
Maybe we're talking at cross purposes; what I mean is that PCA+KNN or other tricks mean that for high dim and large amounts of data you can get useful results; with the enlarged view of KNN as "anything where the last step is KNN" your statement that it's "astoundingly bad" is wrong. But for the narrow view of just KNN then sure cod applies.
I think the most significant term in the Drake equation is the one chosen by users of it to hang themselves on this week. It's an equation that pumps out a number between zero and bazillions dependent on imaginations towards a situation that is nevertheless a paradox. The only thing that can be said right now is that it's perhaps likely that the number is >1.
It's >1 over what volume? The galaxy? The observable universe? All the unreachable volumes of space beyond that in our universe? All the many-worlds branches of this universe?
“Perhaps likely >1” - in whatever volume the Drake equation covers. Until it goes to a certainty of >1 in the volume we can explore then it’s basically =1.
I don’t believe the current absence of evidence is much of a useful data point. Until we have scoured other star systems and the rest of the galaxy turning over rocks we can’t really generate useful empirical data to fill in the numbers on the Drake equation. The paradox of “where is everybody” has myriad solutions.
A mistake definitely lies in philosophers and theorists believing their sci-fi ideas are better than anyone else’s. Certainly not useful data towards writing papers that form a proof of any number as a solution. It’s hard to prove an absence, particularly when there’s a universe of empirical data that can be potentially gathered but hasn’t been yet.
If I was a betting person, I’d put a stake on there being life somewhere like Enceladus. Even life from earth in the form of fungal spores has existed for long enough to escape and float around the galaxy - they’ve had a few hundred million years. Life here could have also landed from elsewhere as easily as terrestrial abiogenesis. There’s just so much we don’t know and haven’t tested. Not being able to pull radio signals out of the noise proves nothing given the mere seventy years of attempts.
I’m not sure about many worlds, and how that could be proved either to be a useful part of science. By the same token, in an infinite universe, then literally every single possibility and permutation is being tried, so in that case, yeah there’s life everywhere. Including a universe where I’m out being the first human to find it rather than writing this comment.
Could technology, defined as the elaborate (=intelligent) and large scale manipulation of non-biological environments be incompatible with the long term survival of biological life (i.e. it is an unstable evolutionary process)?
Its a difficult argument, as all of life manipulates its abiotic surroundings one way or another. Yet the antropocene is clearly at least one qualitative step up. We only have this one data point (our own) so make of that whatever you will. But it doesn't take an ultra-pessimist or doomist psychology to see that on the basis of our behavior the odds that technologically enhanced life self-destructs in short timescales are, indeed, non-zero.
If "intelligent" biology is an intrinsically unstable system (can't self-regulate because primal drives for reproduction, dominance etc highjack mechanisms that are too powerful for its own good) this would make the absence of technosignals self-evident.
Some philosophers in the metaphysics of technology have also proposed this idea. The idea is that the arms race or prisoner's dilemma-type situations make the advance of technology unavoidable (technological determinism) and that its inexorable rise forward eventually has a high probability of extinguishing all life on a planet. (More precisely, determinism states that technological development is a strong force; it can be influenced but it is hard).
We already have climate change, advanced AI (that may eventually be able to produce more technology by itself), and a planet of organisms that are counter to growth. Deforestation happens because the long-term costs are not shouldered by the present generation.
In some way, I believe the end of times is near, but that humanity has TWO possibilities:
(A) The planet is destroyed via advanced technology and most humans die, only to repeat the same mistakes again, OR
(B) We reach a critical mass of enlightenment that consists of (1) a cautious approach to growth, (2) a moderation in the use of technology, and (3) a stable, healthy relationship with the biosphere.
The eventuality (B) is certainly possible if one by one, we start to adopt a philosophy that economic and technological growth isn't the right path and we slowly give up all this advanced stuff for a slower-paced life centered on local communities, local economies, and less efficiency in return for a more peaceful life.
I think there are more than 2 possibilities, and the worst of them is what Orwell called "a boot on a human face, forever". Catastrophe -- accidental or encouraged -- leads to consolidation, then history gets written to make the survivors be the good guys or victims of circumstances, and their victims objects worthy of persecution. I can already smell that in the air, there is nothing that can't be handled with the right narrative.
If all humans died at once, it would suck, but there is more where we came from, so to speak... but systems of control that nip any and all possible challengers to totality of their control in the bud would be so dead, even death would be creeped out.
Things will keep changing forever. I don't know why people are afraid of permanent oppression. We only know of around 10k years of society history, in a planet that has had intelligent apes for 100k years, complex ecosystems for 4b years. Even if we vanish in the next century, the overwhelming chances are that a) uncountable complex ecosystems exist right now; b) uncountable intelligent species exist right now; c) uncountable oppressive and uncountable liberal systems exist right now; d) uncountable intelligent species and complex ecosystems will vanish and emerge over the billions of years ahead.
We get too attached to what we see around us, while Hubble and JW have shown we are utterly insignificant in both time and space.
Countless of other things likely existing doesn't discount any of them. If, to just put it like that, people in all those other liberal and oppressive systems have nothing else to say than "meh, there are countless of other systems", what makes them so significant? I see the how it is and what we rationalize it as, I see the trends and I'm not impressed. That others might do worse or better is completely irrelevant to me, that's to their shame or credit.
There's only shame because there's pride. Feel ways about the world you know, it's like feeling good or bad about how the soap bubble you blow come out.
1. We do not have advanced AI. We have LLMs. They're not intelligent, not creative, and are never going to be. I'm with you on the other things, though.
2. The planet will not be destroyed by anything we do. H. sap. might go extinct along with many, many other species, but give the biospehere a couple of million years and it will all bounce back, sans humans.
I've been living/trialing the path you suggest in your last paragraph for 30 years. Sadly it's not gone viral. AMA. ;)
Well, by "advanced AI", I did not mean truly intelligent AI of course. I meant sufficiently advanced to disrupt society to an extent that will make it worse that it was without it. Advanced as in "advanced weapon", not "smart".
Yes, it is true that the planet won't be destroyed, that is a good point. Only we might, like you said. Though, if many other species go extinct, it is sort of like destruction in a way, even though it isn't total.
Feel free to reach out through the contact info in my profile if you want to collaborate.
The biosphere may well bounce back but it may take an absurdly long time to sequester carbon back into the ground.
The first time it happened, as I understand, there simply wasn't a huge amount of oxygen in the air, so things didn't burn and having megatons of carbon rich organic material lying around wasn't likely to catch fire and jump back into the air.
Now, if I leave a bunch of organic material lying around it'll catch fire and go right back into the air.
I'm not sure how long that'll take to change, or what impact that has on future life here on earth, but we've got 2 examples of earthish planets that don't support life right next door.
>> Now, if I leave a bunch of organic material lying around it'll catch fire and go right back into the air.
Only an issue for the 1/3 of our planet that is dry. By volume/mass, most organic material eventually falls into the deep ocean, a place where fire isn't much of an issue.
Why would carbon need to go back into the ground? It’s really good for plant life in general and only bad for humans who want the earth to remain in the same state it was in 1700 indefinitely.
There will be no follow-up species besides those we evolve into and/or create. We're going to inherit the observable universe to ourselves. Even if we go through a couple of apocalypses on the road to it, it's really hard to imagine a scenario where ALL humans die, so it's much more economic to rebuild a civilization from remaining humans than evolve intelligence again.
That's a whole bunch of unearned certainty, but the same point applies to a post-apocalyptic resurgence of humanity; the second industrial revolution is going to be missing the readily accessible coal and oil that drove the first one along.
I don't see anything wrong with humans wanting to control the climate to turn it back into the ice age that we're used to. I just wish we'd be honest about it instead of appealing to naturalistic fallacies.
> The first time it happened, as I understand, there simply wasn't a huge amount of oxygen in the air
When cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) originally cleaned out Earth's CO2 atmosphere and produced O2, I don't know where the C went. To bedrock as calcium carbonates (CaCO3)?
But the carbon that humankind has released into atmosphere by burning coal and oil, was sequestered by plants during the Carboniferous+Permian periods (360 to 250 million years ago). These were large, vascular plants. Not too much different form plants today. And the atmospheric oxygen was already at about current levels.
But your idea might hold in a different context:
There is a theory that 360My ago plants invented lignin, to make their stems more rigid and woody. And then it took time before fungi were able to invent enzymes that are able to digest lignin. So maybe the the large burial of biomass carbon in Carboniferous could not happen again, with out modern fungi being able to decompose wood.
And there is another theory, that as Carboniferous+Permian periods were during an ice age, the low sea levels allowed for large areas of swampy lowland vegetation. Where vegetation sequestered carbon, and wet swampy soil allowed the carbon to get slowly buried, because microbes cannot as easily decompose biomass in wet, anaerobic conditions.
Or three, none of the above. Those philosophers are arguing from analogy based on one case - which the smarter ones know is philosophically faulty and really just speculation. The probability of calculating the extermination similarly can't be realistically assumed because this time it's based on zero cases, empirically.
But thinking like that doesn't get the likes of Toby Ord and Nick Bostrom millions in funding...
Excellent point, Ill never forget taking a history of armageddon narratives course in 2012 when the Mayan calendar was ending and how simple the social / economic function of end-of-the-world narratives seemed in historical context. Specifically in the context that they have been present for at least as long as weve had writing, which is to say as long as we've had class-stratified societies.
Domesday narratives put us in high-arousal states. We listen to authorities more unquestioningly, we think less critically, we buy more stuff.
Of course that's a slippery slope that can lead to climate denial and conspiracy theories but I like remembering to question who's getting research grants or selling zombie apocalypse gear...
Yeah so much of the philosophy of the future appears to me as science-fiction LARPing as philosophy. The annoying part is that they deny or overlook that, seemingly so enamoured with their own brilliance as they often are. And as you say, doom-mongering in the form of presenting what look like reasonable existential risks is just more amenable to funding. I could sit here imagining up existential risks all day long when all that can be said for the human race and its progress is “ seems to be going ok so far!”
It would be hard to get funding for an existential philosophy that said “everything is fine, and will just roll along and whatever will be will be”.
I feel scenario B is indeed possible: Sophisticated cultural overlays that modify our interaction and impacts on the biosphere are obviously within the nature of the system.
A key question is whether the feedback signals from the biosphere will be strong enough and will be internalized deeply enough to usher a sustainable era. One can only guess, since we haven't really experienced anything of this sort before.
But logically, if scenario B plays out and we enter a sustainable phase we would be sending out technosignatures. Hence if a similar process has repeated across the universe we should at some point see evidence of advanced life that "just made" it. The fact we don't may mean its not possible. But I would not read too much into this pessimistic conclusion because we may be missing important other dimensions regarding the nature of life and its co-evolution with technology.
We should strive to survive independently of what else might be happening in this mysterious Universe :-)
My guess is that we’ll muddle through somewhere halfway between A and B. Sustained enlightenment seems unlikely, unless we start genetic-engineering our brains to behave more constructively. (Messing with our brains that way is quite prone to go the destructive route, of course.)
Why would you want less efficiency? If we had solar panels which power robots that grow food for everyone, you would want to destroy those solar panels and robots? Is it a 'sin' that humans wouldn't have to work?
It's an interesting question, but it's not a blanket statement I made. In some cases, efficiency might be good, but for example, it's often better to have local made products and locally-made foods.
Also, there is the problem that more efficient use of resources make resources more efficiently used. So, how to find the optima?
It's better to grow what grows best in the local environment. You can't grow everything everywhere. Everyone would be really limited in their choice of food if everything was local. Unless we're using some kind of greenhouses, which might eventually be a good idea. But it would require insane amounts of energy.
I'm not sure you know what efficiency means. From Wikipedia: "Efficiency is the often measurable ability to avoid wasting materials, energy, efforts, money, and time while performing a task. In a more general sense, it is the ability to do things well, successfully, and without waste."
Being less efficient means that you're wasting resources, i.e. using more resources than necessary.
I don't think the problem is technological growth itself - the amount of humans on earth and the way incentives are misaligned in a way that wastes large parts of total "effort"/resources are much larger problems IMO.
A society where there was a system that reliable aligned incentives between (eg.) consumers and producers might already reduce resource consumption by an order of magnitude, and would remove most of the "arms race" mentality in risky developments like AI.
Whether we can create such a system in time is a big question though...
(as an aside, while neither socialism or capitalism do anything significant to solve this problem in their current forms, I don't expect either to be incompatible with such an alignment system)
On the opposite side, James Lovelock suggested that life controlling the planetary conditions, is a necessary property for long term survival of life.
For example: Too little oxygen, too much CO2 in the atmosphere: CO2 feeds more plants, oxygen below 16% makes wildfires difficult. So plants grow more. Too much oxygen enhances wildfires, and huge wildfires would burn off parts of plant cover. Atmospheric oxygen concentration would go back down. [1,2]
Lovelock's argument is, that on dead planets the environmental parameters vary in time, and in time they would randomly fluctuate outside of the zone where life is possible. But early life taking control of the planetary environment by establishing feedback mechanisms, is what the long term survival of life in that planed.
Of course, Lovelock doesn't specify intelligent life. Even microbial life could establish feedback mechanisms and maintain planetary homeostasis.
We could make something like the opposite argument too: without technology, biological life has no hope of surviving events like planetary collisions, gamma ray bursts, or home star fuel exhaustion, which are rare on human timescales but common (or even inevitable) in the long-run.
That is clearly true, but you would have to explain the absence of "technosignatures" - even more so if survival means interstellar spead of intelligent / technological life forms.
Evolution is a form of intelligence, and the oxygenation catastrophe was definitely a large-scale manipulation of the environment.
Anthropogenic changes are faster than evolution, but is that an important difference, or is what matters the ratio of speed of damage to speed of cognition?
And beyond us, the same question comes for any AI tasked with doing a thing whose side effects develop not necessarily to our advantage: which is faster, the harm or the improved ability to resolve problems?
> the ratio of speed of damage to speed of cognition?
yes, I too think this ratio is of vital importance (pun). I would not even call it "damage" (rather change) as this is quite anthropocentric and teleological.
But the acceleration induced when moving from cellular trial-and-error biological intelligence to human intelligence seems dramatic. Watching Oppenheimer reminded me of this "funny" moment when people calculated the odds of "igniting the atmosphere". While that is apparently not possible, igniting, e.g., the RNA is more plausible and I would not put it beyond what current societies are capable of.
“ He, I know—for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made—thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilisation only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.”
- H.G. Wells, The Time Machine
That’s one of my favorite literary quotes. From long before nuclear weapons, or climate change.
I think it’s entirely possible that technological civilization is unstable and self destructs. Certainly, at this point of our history, we can see what a fine line we walk. Had the twentieth century been but a little different at key moments, we could have already destroyed our civilization. As we speak there’s a land war in Europe from one great nuclear power, on the borders of the other. A third great nuclear power rises in Asia, as China is ramping up incredibly quickly - no doubt with a eye to deterrent over meddling in their aims on Taiwan. Their long term historical rivals in India, a rising economic power, will likely not sit idly by. They could be the fourth great nuclear power. That of course would force Pakistans hand to try to compete. Next door Iran desperately seeks the bomb to ensure they don’t get the freedom treatment from the West. Across the gulf lies their bitter rival Saudi Arabia, who warn they will have to pursue the bomb if Iran gets it. Meanwhile nuclear armed Israel has promised they will not tolerate a nuclear Iran. And that’s not even 100 years yet since we developed that particular technology. Nor is it the only technology we have that threatens to be more than we can handle.
Without being a biologist my gut feeling is that our biggest immediate self-destruct risk is biological weapons like engineered viruses and the like.
Once you start tinkering with the stuff you are made off while you have not controlled primal behaviors that were conditioned during eras of near zero technological competence the writing is on the wall.
In a sense the nuclear era episode was a benign rehearsal granted to us by the Universe: Here is a black box (nuclear phenomena) that you can discover, use and self-destruct if you want, but it is quite hard to play with. Not so with genetic engineering.
Indeed, as a programmer, I deeply understand the power of being able to modify the source code. Doing that with the code of life is a great responsibility we’re not ready for.
What happens when it gets so easy and cheap that any malcontent group can engineer their own super virus? Will we have a defense for that?
There can only be one defense: no malcontent group (actually no group, period) will be allowed to pursue certain technology paths, no matter what (e.g irrespective of political, ethical, cultural or other differences and opinions). This is a faint echo of the biblical forbidden tree of knowledge (for those culturally familiar) - though the punishment for disobeying is not expulsion from paradise but self-destruction.
The difficulty of embedding such a cultural paradigm as a lived reality across our species is obvious. Yet it is logically unavoidable for survival on a finite planet where independent groups keep pursuing ever more powerful technologies to advance narrow interests.
You’re a bit off. The punishment for disobedience (which was the act of obtaining knowledge of good and evil) was death. Expulsion was not of paradise (which was the entire earth, now tainted and corrupt), but of access to eternal life. Your analogy may fit better than you thought.
Regardless of your feelings about religion, Genesis 3 is not long and foundational for a significant number of groups throughout Western and Middle-eastern history.
How does one control that? Fundamentally, technology is knowledge combined with tools.
You can’t control the knowledge, so the only thing left is control access to the tools.
How do you do that, on a global scale? There is precedent, but it’s not easy.
With nukes we’ve been fortunate that the tools are so expensive and difficult to obtain and create that only nation states can consider them. That could change if we find a cheap way to refine uranium or produce plutonium.
With biology it’s harder to control because the tools have numerous research and peaceful uses.
A lot of modern conflict seems to arise from resource constraints. That doesn't mean removing those constraints wouldn't lead to peace (maybe just different constraints), but it seems possible.
What if we somehow eventually figure out how to move our consciousness to computers? If possible, it would make our biological signals from earth of our current civilization only present for a blip on the radar and for all intents and purposes look like we were snuffed out.
I'm assuming SETI already looks for Dyson Spheres/Swarms and civilizations around black holes though, so perhaps you're right and nobody ever quite makes it to that stage.
From the point of view of physics, there is no fundamental difference between biological life (cell based) and digital life (computer based). You can easily imagine various scenarios in which computers wipe themselves out after taking over from us. Put another way, self-extinction is not something exclusive to biology.
> would make the absence of technosignals self-evident
The so called "grabby aliens" hypothesis suggests that after certain stages of advancement, live propagates at close to speed of light. So according to it we would see the technosignals just before contact/colonization/destruction.
> Some examples of possible resolutions [of the paradox] are that intelligent life is rarer than is thought, that assumptions about the general development or behavior of intelligent species are flawed, or, more radically, that current scientific understanding of the nature of the universe itself is quite incomplete.
My theory is that once a species has tech to make itself immortal, the drive to reproduce will be over. Thus you don’t see life everywhere, primitive life gets stuck in their own system.
If you you see the pace of acceleration of humans, I wouldn’t be surprised if we can get immortality type tech with in 500 years
The two futures of high tech civilizations are determined by who prevails: lifeforms may become "machinized" or machines may become enlighted with life. The first future is the doom of civilizations highly intelligent, but selfish and not gifted with intuition for this reason.
The anthropocene ain't got shit on the evolution of photosynthesis. The Earth's atmosphere went from near 0 to 20 percent O2. We're in the PPM region for carbon dioxide.
Is anyone looking at the stars itself? Isn't modulating the light from a star the easiest way to transmit information afar? This would be the case if you want someone to notice.
If I was a digital superintelligence, I would try to conquer the universe by transmitting myself everywhere with maximum power, including instructions to construct a computer which can run me. I could do this by constructing a modulating device around a star. Surely there would be some sort of 'easy detection code' which allows primitive species to first notice the signal and start studying it, and then progressively include more advanced instructions + data.
> If I was a digital superintelligence, I would try to conquer the universe by transmitting myself everywhere with maximum power
Hah. This is the plot of "Existence" by David Brin.
In this book, civilizations are destroyed by crystals, containing computers running virtual realities for its inhabitants. The inhabitants subvert the civilizations, giving them technology to build these crystals, upload themselves into them, and then spend all the resources to spam the universe with these crystals.
Building something around a star would require so much effort. would it not be easier to send out something at a further distance so it could be smaller and eclipse the star for anything on that path? you could then open/close it like a shutter to make it blink the signal. you'd have to put one in the line of sight for each thing you're communicating with, but that still seems easier than some dyson sphere type object
Ooooh it’s one of my favorite movies I’m surprised I never realized there is a book! Actually I probably knew at some point that there was a book but it didn’t occur to me it would be better than the movie!
but by going alone, it adds that much more tension/suspicion on if it actually happened. it's easier to believe if more people go and have the same experience. unless it's the Sphere where they all just agree on the idea.
I just skimmed the paper. Does it say how strong a signal would have to be on a home planet to be detectable by SETI? My understanding is there aren't any earth signals produced by humans that would be detectable by Earth level instruments past Proxima Centauri but perhaps things have changed.
The upper bound given in the paper is on emitters of one terawatt EIRP (10^12 Watts) and above. EIRP means an isotropic emitter would need to be this powerful to be detected. A beamed transmitter that happened to be pointing in our direction could be somewhat weaker in total power, and still be detectable.
It's important to realize that this is at least 100,000 times more powerful than our most powerful Earth-based narrowband emitters. So we would not detect ourselves in this search - not even close.
Moreover, we have no good reason to believe that an advanced species would have cause to radiate 1 TW into space. Our own terrestrial emissions are becoming weaker over time, not stronger, as we optimize for total system bandwidth in our communications.
So I wouldn't draw too many strong conclusions here about alien life. We are still very much searching for our lost keys directly under the lampposts.
So how many stars of spectral type earlier than M8, so type O, B, A, F, G, K, and early M-type stars, are there within a 100 parsec (or 326 light-year) radius of the Sun? How would I go about finding an answer, is there an easily query-able database or astronomy app? GPT4 doesn't know, Wolfram Alpha doesn't know, last time I needed an astronomical answer I bought a ProjectPluto Guest license, but I lost the license.
Summing up densities for O-K stars in [1] inside the volume of a sphere of r=100 pc, I end up with ~ 91,600 stars. If we include M dwarfs that number rises to ~ 375,000 stars.
>> Jean-Luc Margot, Megan G. Li, Pavlo Pinchuk, Nathan Myhrvold, Lea E. Alcantara, Megan T. Andrakin, Jeth Arunseangroj, Damien S. Baclet, Madison H. Belk, Zerxes R. Bhadha, Nicholas W. Brandis, Robert E. Carey, Harrison P. Cassar, Sai S. Chava, Calvin Chen, James Chen, Kellen T. Cheng, Alessia Cimbri, Benjamin Cloutier, Jordan A. Combitsis, Kelly L. Couvrette, Brandon P. Coy, Kyle W. Davis, Antoine F. Delcayre, Michelle R. Du, Sarah E. Feil, Danning Fu, Travis J. Gilmore, Emery Grahill-Bland, Laura M. Iglesias, Zoe Juneau, Anthony G. Karapetian, George Karfakis, Christopher T. Lambert, Eric A. Lazbin, Jian H. Li, Zhuofu (Chester)Li, Darren J. Lu, Detao Ma, Vedant Mathur, Mary H. Minasyan, Mark T. Nasielski, Janice T. Nguyen, Lorraine M. Nicholson, Divij Ohri, Atharva U. Padhye, Supreethi V. Penmetcha, Yugantar Prakash, Xinyi (Cindy)Qi, Vedant Sahu, Joshua A. Scally, Zefyr Scott, Trevor J. Seddon, Lara-Lynn V. Shohet, Anchal Sinha, Anthony E. Sinigiani, Jiuxu Song, Spencer M. Stice, Andria Uplisashvili, Krishna Vanga, Amaury G. Vazquez, George Vetushko, Valeria Villa, Maria Vincent, Ian J. Waasdorp, Ian B. Wagaman, Amanda Wang, Jade C. Wight, Ella Wong, Natsuko Yamaguchi, Zijin Zhang, Junyang Zhao, Ryan S. Lynch
Man...! How do people in those research fields where it's standard to have a few dozen authors a paper choose the order of authors' names?
My guess is that in this case the first 4 listed are main contributors (in whatever way: authors, funding, ...) , while the following are alphabetically sorted.
What's Nathan Myhrvold doing in there, up near the top no less? Not to be a salty sounding skeptic, but basic research funding is awful hard to secure through conventional grant processes (as well as being a huge time sink) and it's absolutely wonderful to have an interested billionaire on your team.
Shouldn't we be looking for civiliations near black holes? Time dilation, which makes time pass slower when closer to the black hole, would result in a relatively "longer living" universe, and there's plenty of free energy and materials to harvest, and also the BH would be a natural trash can, basically solving all the energy/production/disposal/time-span problems of any civilization.
Edit: tldr; Vernor Vinge, the guy who originally coined the phrase "the singularity", wrote a really excellent SciFi novel about information archaeology, artificial intelligence, galaxy-spanning civilizations, black holes, and all sorts of other dope ish.
Totally unrelated, I had hoped "ish" died. For the unaware, the youths 10 years ago were using that as a substitute for "shit." It is a dumb new word because it already exists and means "approximately" or "slightly" as a suffix. So dopish is slightly dopey (slow/dumb). Yes, I subscribe mostly to words evolving. I don't like this case specifically. </tangent>
Ha! Intellectually I completely agree. This particular term has recently worked its way back into my social circle's lexicon because we all have young kids and are trying to swear less. I'm not sure I have ever used it in writing before, and I guess I never will again!
Thank you for the recommendation. Growing up I was a big fan of John Brosnan's trilogy Sky Lords - post apocalyptic / genetic wars sci-fi with zepellins - what is there not to like :).
Seeing this is by Brosnan as well means it's an instant buy for me.
I found his books (which IMO are not that famous) because our local library had them. Otherwise I don't think I would have stumbled upon it.
Same applies to Walter Jon Williams and his Hardwired which was one of my early favorites. I was amazed to find out later that this book is one of inspirations for Cyberpunk tabletop games and Cyberpunk 2077.
Completely unrelated, but what blossomed in my mind reading your comment was the brief synopsis of a race of beings close enough to a black hole that it significantly began to alter the likelihood of them facing conditions no longer compatible with life and the stories of what life would look like for these societies.
If you expect any outside civilizations might be hostile, wouldn't a slower frame of reference magnify the risk, both in terms of giving slower civ a disadvantage in adaptation/response times if any conflict did occur, and also in giving the faster frames more time to spawn hostile civilizations?
It probably depends what the limits of physics actually are. If interstellar war is actually practical given the laws of nature, you might be worried about such things. Otherwise, doesn't matter.
park your army away from the black hole and build up your weapons and drones before the battle. you could build up resources at speeds orders of magnitude greater than the black hole civ
Iirc if you get close enough to a black hole for time dilation to be substantial, then things are going to be pretty inhospitable in other ways. We couldn't survive the gravitational field gradient, for example. Strong imagination required to imagine aliens that would cope with it.
This idea is perpetuated by Isaac Arthur who assumes any such civilization will be digital with only their computers and automatons required to sustain them existing in the physical realm.
1 Primitive species uses primitive methods, another more advanced species would use a new form of transmission/detection to contact equivalent advanced species.
2 the window of a species transmitting could be in hundreds of years at any point of the billions of years the universe a has existed and we have to also be at that same window.
Unrelated: Is that number of authors common? I don't look at many research papers but in my limited viewing, that seems to be a huge number of authors?
Imagine a star system where there is CO2 rich planet closer than the main habitated planet (think earth as main planet and Venus as CO2 rich inner planet). At some point civilization will try to terraform the CO2 planet by venting CO2 into space, but they don't want to poison their own planet so there will be seasonal gaps in CO2 emissions just when the inner planet crosses in front of main planet.
So to find such civilizations you only need to know 2 orbital periods and monitor CO2 or other gas emissions. Any drop during the conjunction is the technosignature.
First, you can "vent" CO2 outside of the plane of the ecliptic.
Second, you do not "vent" CO2 anyway. Why would you do that? It's stupid and wasteful. You just transform it into diamond and bury it inside the crust.
yeah ie for us O2 would be nice, I mean really nice... anybody did calculation how warm would Venus be if we somehow broke that runaway greenhouse effect? I can imagine poles may be quite hospitable temperature wise.
> Based on our observations, we found that there is a high probability (94.0-98.7%) that fewer than ~0.014% of stars earlier than M8 within 100 pc host a transmitter that is detectable in our search (EIRP > 10e12 W).
A terawatt transmitter is one hell of a transmitter. That's about 10% of the power our entire civilization consumes, IIRC. The civilizations detectable in this search would have to be much more advanced than our own, to be able to dedicate such a large amount of power to a single transmitter.
It’s EIRP, not actual radiated power. If the beam is narrow this is achievable with moderate total power. The DSN transmitter in Canberra is capable of this EIRP on about 100 kW total power.
EIRP is the power as if transmitting isotropically over the whole sphere. The actual power can be a lot lower if concentrated in one direction. Arecibo EIRP was 10e13.
This means that civilization, like ours, could transmit to each star instead of all directions. But that would mean deliberately communicating.
In the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun, one which I doubt anyone is sending directional signals towards.
I also wonder if we could recognize a signal from an advanced civilization. Wouldn’t compression and encryption make most signals tend towards appearing like noise?
The only signal we could possibly detect would be a deliberate one. No one sending a deliberate signal to an unknown alien civilization is going to encrypt or encode everything. Besides being unintelligible they'd literally look like noise and be discarded by the receiver.
It'd would make more sense to use a beacon with some obviously non-natural pattern. Then something like the Arecibo Message[0] on some mathematically related frequency.
The likelihood of picking up spurious stray signals from an alien civilization is vanishing small. Even our most powerful broadcasts from Earth will fade to noise before hitting Pluto. Radar (weather or military) might be detectable half way to Alpha Centauri. You'd need a very narrow beam (to focus the input power) to get a detectable signal a few light years distant.
I use kiwisdr when I want to test propagation as a receiver, and I tend to transmit carrier only or Morse, which is extremely narrow and I can get a lot of power in a narrow bandwidth. If I see a line or dashes on the receiver, I know my signal makes it through, and I can switch to a protocol that can "be heard below the noise floor" and see how good the "channel" I've made is.
If I was in charge of letting the galaxy know we existed, it would just be a carrier or a solid tone as loud as I could make it. To get fancier I'd have the transmitter tap out the Fibonacci sequence as CW, as close to 1 second on pulses as I could conceivably make it - and I can get close with the kit I have now.
Oh I agree if I wanted to be known I would send out some highly structured signal. That assumes a lot though, particularly a desire to be known. I could imagine quite easily a counter scenario not even based on paranoia - maybe interstellar distances are so vast and the period civilizations try to be known in is so short that they all essentially give up on being known, and the chance of two civilizations overlapping in that window is much smaller than the length of an advanced civilization. Or, without watching every where all at once all the time we just won’t see them in their space life hubris phase that I feel we are likely exiting already. Realistically Drakes equation and a non Martian search for life has only been going on for 50 years. I doubt it’ll be going on in earnest for another 50. That’s a single human life span.
My wager is little to no SETI investment as we settle into the assumption we are either the first, the only, or are structurally isolated from intelligent life in the universe. A collective shoulder shrug and a refocus on survival in our dirty terrarium.
A truly advanced society might be investing significant effort into making itself detectable to other civilizations though. Any civilization experiencing a substantial post-scarcity phase would be likely to have at least some off-shoot groups which use their substantial resources to engage in this activity.
i.e. if energy was functionally free for the average man (because we had the Dyson swarm up and running or something), then what are the odds that some group wouldn't have used their time to build a transmitter to act as a beacon? Could we even stop them if they wanted to (i.e. even if we didn't want to broadcast locally, sending probes to Alpha Centauri and broadcasting from there would be a good way to conduct intelligence gathering on potential interstellar threats).
We've been broadcasting at quite detectable volume for "contact" (sagan) 100 light- years in a radiating spherical radius. We didn't even have to argue about it.
Beaconing, assumes random dice throw (of who to beacon at) pays off. I'd say the odds are worse than lotto winning: Higher input costs, lower chance of success.
You don't need to though: directed radio can be switched to point at different targets. In fact this would be preferable: i.e. blinking prime numbers out into the universe could be by switching radio targets to create the message.
Again, you assume that point-source RF which beacons to many places by switching aligns with when they're looking. You have to do a LOT Of hand waving around "better wiser Aliens can listen everywhere all the time" for this to pay off, and I would observe if this is such a brilliant technique, how come we haven't received the beams sent to us?
When we find another civilization, what are the odds that it is more civilized than us? I think that is highly likely because we have had telescopes only a few thousand years.
So let's assume that most civilizations we might find are more advanced than us. They have bigger more advanced weapons most likely. So does it make sense to try to tell them our very new civilization exists? Would it help us somehow if they discover us? Perhaps not UNTIL our civilization is capable enough.
Other civilizations probably would have similar thoughts and therefore they would not try to contact us, until they feel they have developed enough. Which is probably never.
I mean did American Indians really want to be discovered by Europeans?
Your premise is a little self-referential. Civilizations imply civilized, ours and theirs are both going to think themselves civilized, but might not recognise one another as such. Aboriginal Australians didn't find the colonisers of that continent particularly civilised and the colonisers didn't find them civilised. Our planet could be seen as so uncivilised as to be a worthy candidate for annihilation. Or building a space bypass through our solar system.
It always boggles my mind that there is this relatively well-put together effort at looking for extraterrestrial life in the stars that. . . just sort of ignores the fact that UAPs exist and are already here. It's this weird massive epistemic blindspot that tends to come across as smugly pseudointelligent. We should be looking for technosignatures from other bodies in our solar system in addition to what's done here. The signal might be stronger and at the very least it's much closer to where we know these guys are hanging out.
Ever wondered why a civilization which mastered manned space travel would keep crashing into a planet for 50 years?
UAPs are very convenient for top secret military projects, I bet whoever thought of them couldn’t have imagined that the ruse would work so well for so long.
UAPs that have been studied with any kind of scientific scrutiny have turned out to be ducks and similar advanced forms of non-human life. Beautiful creatures, to be sure, but not exactly what SETI is aiming to find.
There are a lot of people trying very hard to investigate UFOs/UAPs. To my knowledge, they haven't been successful. I'd be surprised if they haven't tried surveying the solar system, and the solar system is sufficiently small that I would expect it to be cheap to get results.
In other words, the likelihood that they either lived before or (will live) after us is overwhelming, since the time scale of the universe is so vast compared to the time scale (with our one known example) of a civilization.
Our timeline is like the blink of an eye, compared to the age of the universe. Very unlikely that nearby blinks would happen at exactly the same time, even with a 11,000+ multiplier.