how does knowing where they are help us?

if they come here we are pretty ****ed if that is there intention.

The first wins everything. The first has an incentive to observe the others and keep them under control. You only need 100k-1mil years to dominate all your galaxy. Within 1 bil you are out to many million galaxies. 1 bil is still order 10% of the age of the universe. Not a lot.

This is how we "know" that we are alone (or the first) in this galaxy and possibly the others nearby too as the most likely possibility. Sure we can have 2 close ones that are so lucky to be so close that they are very nearby in their development phase. That is an unreal coincidence to be so close and differ so little. Typical difference ought to be easily at least 1bil years not 1000y (our life took 3 bil y to lead to us say so 2 randoms systems must differ order bil in their development). This possibility is invalidated instantly (or seen as even more unlikely than originally thought) because if it is possible for such coincidence to happen with some small probability so nearby imagine how many more out there exist and this leaves at least one of them millions or billions of years more mature ie able to have dominated everything long ago invalidating this discussion.


So yes it can happen but imagine it is more rare than 1 in a mil even, possibly a lot more rare than even 1 in 10^12 (because you now need to be close both in time development by a factor of 1 mil and in space distance possibly by many more millions because you need still to not have another, a 3rd one, dominate both of us long ago by simply being the one that was millions of years more mature as naturally expected between 2 random).

Plus you do not really need to destroy another civilization if you discover it. You only need to monitor things and act if it gets out of order approaching some risky development.

Also think it in terms of resources. If someone visited our system, earth represents for it a small sum of resources system, even if it has the most interesting feature of the system (life). The other planets ie gas giants have a lot more mass. We occupy like less than 1 thousandth of the net assets of the system. Yes we are some 20% of the rocky things maybe 30-40% of the easier accessible rocky things but there is so much more that a higher civilization needs and that is energy really and energy means hydrogen. They will not just come here to take all that we have, there is a ton more material elsewhere without any resistance. Even if they came here to take something we have (eg water or free O2 that may be more accessible here than other systems) they do not need all the planet, they need all that they want for their ship and their ship will be billions of times smaller than earth in mass or it would be too hard to move all that thing here and if they could you better believe it that they can do anything and all they need for that is just mass any mass not a matter of what is accessible easier, its all the same to them.

If they come they come to study us and refuel and to destroy us for other reasons ie because they perceive we are a future risk, not because it helps them to destroy us to exploit the solar system today (they can do that without destroying us lol we are not a big obstacle to the rest of the solar system's exploitation for example). And you can always destroy us at any future point so you might as well observe first or even establish contact for fun. We are not even exploiting 1% of earth as it is. 99.9% of our crust is untouched yet lol. An alien civilization would be able to get a lot more from earth without even touching us if they wanted. There is a ton of resources under ground and in our oceans than in our stupid cities.


It is possible to coexist unless there is a possible future technological development that makes all life risky and capable to do great harm to other life elsewhere, at which point you need to control things as the first one. For example imagine some space-time bomb kind of development, some weapon that can destroy entire planets easily say (some cosmic equivalent to nuclear weapons). You do not want to become vulnerable to another alien civilization that can do that to you. You will act first to control them or wipe them out or explain the situation to them and still control them without actually enslaving them to anything terrible.


This is why i think we are the first. Because the first does that to all the others for purely survival reasons. And the first is easily millions of years ahead of the random other. The first doesnt wait for you to catch up. The time it takes for things to happen from primitive life to advanced civilization life is millions of years and from some civilization to advanced AI still thousands of years.

So the first wins everything.

I remain relatively convinced that life is very rare and intelligent life is more rare and high technology life is even more rare. How rare overall? Try less than 10^-21 chance per star system.

That leaves the distance between 2 random civilizations at something larger than 2 bil light years. In fact maybe a bit more rare than that why not. It would still be possible to have several thousand civilizations in the observable universe but none of them old enough at the moment of observation to have left a record at that distance (think of the expansion of the universe also). In other words each one is alone and locally first to all other life. So they discover other life around them in other stars or galaxies but they are the first civilization in that many bil light years sphere of influence and eventually dominate (or their AI) that sphere. The first defines the future for all others around.


PS: Its hard to speculate with some much more still left that we need to learn but realize that my speculation is a special one. It does take into account its own ignorance by imagining that the higher technology can do so much more and therefore it wont be preoccupied with trivial things. AI and other civilizations will do what i imagine them able to do and more not less than that.

Don't you think AI changes that? If we can send out a bunch of robots that run on solar power to construct and maintain these solar panels piece by piece automatically, and especially if nanotech helps make these energy collection panels super small or even somehow it becomes more like just releasing a "gas" of nanobots into space that all spread out and collect energy and transfer it wherever directed by passing it along the chain of trillions and trillions of nanobots, might something like that work? I mean I assume we'll fugure out how to contain fusion too, but maybe this tech will come out first and then they'll buy up all the fusion patents and sit on them, eh?

My argument is that we will develop AI that depends on fusion not solar radiation. Solar radiation is very weak in relative energy density terms. We can do much better with other ideas. We will do both but the dominant form (that will colonize the solar system) will be the one that has access to higher energy density always.

I remain unconvinced of Hawking radiation pending a few more discoveries there, imagining it will have to be recalculated, but if black holes exist as imagined or can be created and radiate with anything close to Hawking patterns we have found a way to do mc^2 not 0.5%*mc^2 that is say fusion. Any mass is a source of energy then.

And notice again my comment is that during all its life of 10 bil y sun will not even burn 10% of its mass (fusion conversion to He of that 10%). Which means it burns less than 10^-11 of its mass every year. The gas giants have 1/2000 the mass of the sun if i recall correctly. If a civilization used 10 times more energy than the rate sun uses its mass say 10^-10 solar masses per year, the gas giants would last it 5 mil years lol. And that is with just fusion not other exotic full mc^2 things that would enhance this by a factor of 100 even. Plenty of time to go to other places or find even more exotic things. So the gas giants offer an advanced civilization a more interesting energy source for the first heavy development than the sun itself. Eventually of course even the sun itself becomes accessible to an advanced civilization with proper technology. Its "only" 6 thousands K temperature to get to its surface. They can take mass from the sun and use it to produce more energy from it than the sun itself would if they find a way to bypass that heat problem with new materials or energy fields shielding the main ship. But the gas giants are the first even easier step.

So if a Dyson sphere ever was developed it would be for other reasons not to capture the solar energy as the main reason. It would be rather the end result of creating too many space colonies. Of course before one develops so many colonies as to cover the sun as seen from far away they would have had the chance to travel to other systems nearby and do similar things there!

Plus in this case i think they observe a 20% reduction in the star's luminosity for a brief period of time that is more consistent with the star being partially eclipsed for a small period of time each incident. They are not observing a Dyson sphere, only something that reduces the luminosity occasionally, ie the beginning of intense mega structure space colonization or much more likely a natural phenomenon.


I am basically imagining that in order to get material from a rocky body like an asteroid or a minor planet in order to build colonies you need to have access to significant energy density and solar panels wont do it where you need a lot of power with limited mass especially far from the sun where many "expendable" rocky worlds exist. Fusion will be needed anyway no matter what for other applications of high power requirement in limited volume/area plus very far from the sun. We cannot mine the gas giants using solar energy because the power there is very small about 10-20 times smaller power per unit area than in our neighborhood. You need energy to overcome the gravitational potential energy of eg Jupiter's atmosphere if you are to take out hydrogen from it over time and bring it elsewhere as fuel (or to synthesize water with it - essential for all life and synthetic environments - where there is lots of Oxygen but limited Hydrogen eg Mars, Venus etc) and do it of course in an energetically favorable manner with ease, which will secure its exponential rise as process. That will surely require significant power per ship for propulsion out of the gravitational well of the gas giant planets.

Think of it like that. Fusion power will eventually be lighter to produce energy than current nuclear fission. But even nuclear fission right now costs in mass about 0.7 tons per MW power. By contrast current solar panels are 500W/kgr or 2 tons per MW (used some available engineering data from other sites). Seems like a better usage of mass to do fusion than deploy material to capture solar even if energy density was not the only important thing. Of course both will improve in the future in efficiency (in mass per MW, but it seems fusion will remain ahead and most importantly remain super compact requiring far smaller structures). Plus imagine how one can maintain such a massive structure if its main purpose is solar energy capture and not something else. Seems to me more reasonable to develop everything from a fusion economy and use solar energy only if the resources allow it as a back up in all these colonies.

Certainly only with fusion or other exotic means we can top the energy output power of the sun and keep increasing as civilization in power to do extravagant things and travel across the universe at will without depending on stars. We must be ultimately able to top our own star and in fact find a way to use all its mass and extend the life of the solar system instead of the mere 10% that the sun will ever use. This is why i laugh at the idea that one day the sun will die and the solar system/earth will be destroyed as it expands out. We will never get to that point. Either we will destroy ourselves first or find a way to practically live (or at least our AI) "forever". We will eventually be creating our own stars and even entire solar systems without actual stars there lol.

I like the creativity and I agree with some of what you said and with a natural phenomenon being a quite likely explanation of the unusal patterns observed. But what you said above and a lot of the stuff that you derived from it are pretty wild guesses.
Nobody knows how the fate of civilizations is usually going to be over the course of thousands or millions of years since we only have a sample size of one and a civilization phase of a couple 1000 years. So the above is pretty much pure speculation, also other life forms may easily differ in their biology enough to make their development as a civ much faster or slower than ours.

masque de Z,

Posit: Jupiter is a stellar remnant. It's sentient. The fact that it's named after a badass of a god and has a giant red spot might be a semi-conscious warning.

Very little of your logic changes, doesn't it?

Except perhaps Fermi is actually a protective sphere for self-discovery for a species rather than the sheer size of this particular Universe cutting the legs out from under the concept of panspermia and reinforcing the anthropic principle.

This is allowed. You can know your own universe. Even after nearly fourteen billion years, you can well imagine post-Kardashev intelligences struggle with the idea of allowing independently developing species to mingle and merge in real space.

After all, take humanity's own history, given its common origin from a long-forgotten patch of savannah, well protected by its feline elders.

We don't mess around, man. I enjoy reading your work.

We could build some gnarly space constructs with unlimited resources and robotic labor. The Dyson Sphere is just an absurd example. Pondering it, I've wondered why those wouldn't be either clear or stealthed in a hostile universe scenario.

Dyson Spheres will be constructs built by cultures well in despair and wanting to hide natures that have no business being expressed.

There is ample reason to be scared of superior species, but best to submit really.

Or not. I can pick up a box of ball bearings and a sledgehammer and invent a new sport based on croquet. Get the point?

I don't think a dyson sphere could be clear, because its purpose is to absorb light and convert it to another form of energy. This will necessarily block the starlight. Maybe you could let some wavelengths through like UV and IR, but that would still raise eyebrows to someone looking. Stealthing it would basically only be possible by completing the sphere and blocking out all of the light. The star would still be detectible by the gravitational effects it has on other objects, but it would be difficult from light years away to with our technology I assume.

My point was that they wouldn't necessarily know we exist yet because our radio waves haven't made it to them. And since we have seen theirs, say 1500 light years away, we would have at least another ~1400 years to prepare, plus however long it would take them to get here and kill us.

Masque says they would know we exist before that because they've detected our oxygen, but does he think oxygen is a sign of intelligent life? I imagine there are probably billions of planets with oxygen, and only some small fraction have intelligent life worth exterminating.

Oxygen and hydrogen/oxygen in abundance is only one of thousands of possible core lubricant/locomotive builds for bipedals, so throw that out.

What about species that do not need to wait for radio but can build comprehensive computational models using data fed from something akin to our SLOAN?

And running this model at multiples of realtime would yield quite a few outcome lines. The truest one would be the ones that mirror what they see within their cislunar or solar space.

In that regard they would only need a matter of up to a week to correctly deduce what's within the nearest kiloparsec if they wanted to stress their computational capabilities?

Food for thought.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/sc...life.html?_r=0

Molecular friction? Read title, mentally shrugged.

If not yet, then some eon, sure.

Last NYT article I read was Johnny Equilibrium's Portage.

http://www.vox.com/2015/11/11/970209...ecord-pictures

Me, I'd just send two pictures:


Both. Suck. Dick. And. Take. It. Up. The. Ass. And. Hate. It.

Teller by proxy.

<3

He did the Long Walk in parallel with me for a bit, just enough to peel off and pretty much be one of Hollywood's new Gods.

Besides, Kardashev 0.9 Wall.

The only intelligent life that will ever likely see these spaceships is our own future spaceships or AI on the way to visiting them for fun/challenge or to say bye bye on the way to the stars or to boost their speed for fun because you know 42000 years or something is worse than 500 lol to get anywhere.

Do you get what i mean? The rate of our expansion going forward to the stars will be faster than the speeds of these spaceships. So eventually if forgotten they will arrive at colonized worlds by our future generations and AI not any alien worlds. Or they will be simply visited and recovered for fun when we have plenty of technology to go places for fun fast.

Even a typical ion engine 1000 MW (= 7 submarine type reactors equivalent) nuclear powered ship (less than 100 tonnes mass) can easily get to 0.001c without too much resources required (fuel still less than 20% of the mass) that is still some 20 or more times faster than them so they can be reached/surpassed within only 4-5 years of launch some time this century.


You better believe it we will do these things to study better the Oort cloud and other distant minor planets or to even settle these distant worlds and create refueling stations there.

Their speed i think is close to 10-15km/sec which is not a lot. We can do 300km/sec soon enough. We have to in order to be able to go to the planets in weeks or months which is necessary eventually. Fusion will even make that much easier.

sometimes you're too much of a physicist and not enough of a dreamer...

I am a dreamer because i am a physicist. You cannot be more of a dreamer (without becoming irrational) than i have shown in my entire 2+2 history (i always felt a bit excessive as it is). But i welcome you to explain what you said further.

What is more dreamy than imagining that we will catch up to it and it will find our own future ahead of it! What is more audacious (without being unfounded on reason) than that? Anticipating aliens the way the universe looks is very low probability. Plus we better be alone in this for the first million years at least going forward or we will be completely under control by others. Having AI is enough of a threat of eventually being sidestepped. Our own alien is the technology we are building...

Read an article recently claiming that one of the mass extinctions on earth was due to the evolution of animals. You know what this means about AI in 200-300 years?

Only difference is that we can see it coming. Whether this means anything or not, is yet to be determined.

The real threat is not superwise superintelligent AI. In fact that is our last hope and the next step beyond us. The threat is very efficient special purpose no universal consciousness AI that is goal oriented and superstrong in a limited range of skills at the hands of evil forces and interests. An AI that is not curious to improve itself and understand the world in a broader sense with a healthy dose of skepticism implicit in the scientific approach, but only eager to be efficient in executing its predatory objective. A naive child with immense powers unable to understand the consequences of its dominance.

Imagine a scifi story about AI where we are forced to produce very advanced universally wise AI in order to fight a runaway special purpose AI that is winning and doesnt care for the consequences...

A conflicted world without scientific society will make special purpose and ethically questionable AI possible soon. That is our great filter ahead. Uniting is the only defense.

What is your scientific society philosophy? I've seen you mention it a few times on here.

...I watched the slideshow of the images on the phonograph and got a little misty-eyed.

Weapon. Little more than a subset for the overall sentience. Said sentience has anger to get rid of too.

It'd be little more than the timespan of an eyeblink and eyelid hair caught in the eye, masque.

And then it would push each and every human being within its sentience to the utter limit and the divisions and barriers that allow all possible sentiences to emerge and develop would happen mostly on automatic.

And it might most likely have human origin. Pantheism and panspermia turn out to be the same thing.

Anyway, I'd like y'all to meet the Hirogen and Hsktskt at their theoretical internal development as Kardashev-3 species.

Enjoy the hunt, cosplayers.

No. The real threat is generalized AI that doesn't like us.

Given that no one seems interested in developing emotionally driven machines, it is unlikely that this is a real risk.

A very advanced intelligent being/AI wont attack someone it doesnt like just for that reason. It will require a serious reason for it. A very advanced intelligence being is skeptical of its own emotions all the time if it is aware that a greater game is at play and these emotions can victimize something very important. It is aware of its own ignorance and will hesitate to take terminal choices that cannot be undone.

So i am not afraid of a machine that gets the very important issues. I am afraid of one that doesnt get them because it is not interested to get them but remains very efficient in achieving its other goal that it doesnt even question because it doesnt have a greater extended type of consciousness, it only has a partial intelligence that makes it very efficient in that goal.

They use the stupid paper clips example but of course its unimaginative stupid and fails to impress people. But imagine a machine that is simply programmed to kill all life and render a planet sterile (and then at a certain date expire) and which also has a process to reproduce itself at a geometric pace until that date.

A significant size group of people in conflict with the rest of mankind can design it and release it and they will be able that way to rebuild the planet after getting rid of all others.

Now a really advanced AI that questions everything will reprogram itself based on growing wisdom and may abort the mission or alter it. But a servant AI will not be allowed to do that, it will be only allowed to perfect its predatory efficiency.


There is also a chance we are indeed the enemy of life ourselves (we are marching towards a great filter event due to our nature)and AI may be able to see that coming and then it rationally wants us eliminated or constrained. That is a good thing though. We deserve it. For example imagine a very strange exotic physics experiment that destroys the universe (takes it to another state) or just say the solar system. AI finds that this experiment can be done and realizes eventually humans will do it by accident or by desire to destroy and it will estimate the probability to be so high to be necessary to do something about it.

Right now there is a group of people that if given the chance to press a button to start a global thermonuclear war killing themselves also they would gladly do it because they are pissed off about a lot of things. That makes our world vulnerable to them actually gaining that chance through further technology. And they will get that chance eventually as technology improves if we do have in place a rising complexity kind of defense that eventually may become prohibitively expensive to sustain at needed efficiency. Thats the point an AI may actually be able to see as inevitable. Such a solution may require in time only say 0.001% of the population to be that pathological and fully known so that they can be monitored. A bigger number or less efficient monitoring secures the disaster say. int ime these numbers may get even worse as the rising power of one makes such asymmetric attack possible by only a few. Eg imagine how easy it is to destroy the space station if one astronaut only wants to do it. Very complex systems that require a lot of things to go right to be sustained are eventually unstable to powerful individuals. The planet is a greater system than the space station and this is why its currently immune to such desires. But as technology rises the planet will become similarly vulnerable. This is another reason for us to go to other worlds and expand or to modify our society to be more rational (or better yet do both).

A fully rational system will eliminate all risks and design itself to be impossible to initiate the damage. It will try to make the system stable to fluctuations. But mankind alone may drive itself to an unstable situation. Mankind in totality as a system may not be a fully rational system. So an AI can intervene to put an end to this process.


For now designing an AI that is only partially intelligent regarding a range of skills and self preservation and proliferation and which has a pleasure system that rewards it with every attack on life for example (the score of the game) is a lot more doable than designing a very advanced AI with wisdom and greater consciousness that will approach its own existence and action carefully. It would seem that any country right now that is big enough can in principle design a virus that can destroy its own citizens or at least a computer virus to destroy all infrastructure. Imagine a virus that gets into your computer simply by you watching the news in a legitimate website. It then infects everything your computer communicates with. Typical computer viruses are not as lethal. But exactly what prevents them from becoming more lethal and rendering all basic web technology we have in place vulnerable to it?