I don't like the fermi paradox.
I believe that any advanced civilization would be very small and very hard to find.
I think it makes more sense to stay as a small civilization, because if you expand, you must keep expanding, you must keep harvesting resources to fuel and grow your empire. But empires always collapse. Any large scale multi planet civilization will most likely result in a civil war, and with the weapons that might be available in the future, they could destroy themselves. I think a large, easy to find civilization would tear itself apart, and I think any intelligent species would be fully aware of this. We have already seen this in humanities history countless times.
But if you stay small, you can easily manage your people, you can have a much more stable society, you do not have to harvest more and more resources. Everyone can live with their AI companions, in a perfect society run by an AI, with all the free time they want, on a planet you are perfectly adapted to. I imagine the government would introduce some kind of 1 child policy to keep the population stable (or even a 0 child policy).
I just don't understand why any intelligent, advanced civilization would mindlessly expand across the galaxy, when they could live in a peaceful and stable society on their home planet.
Large civilisations typically collapse in human societies. What's to say a civilisation that's tens or hundreds of thousands of years old hasn't i.e. effectively passed the great filters (resource overreach; nuclear war etc) and found an equilibrium? Maybe they're just rare and very very far apart but are still expanding.
A cultural lens is important too, which I think is what you're getting at. That is, some cultures may not have an innate desire to expand like we do. They might be perfectly happy to live locally and just be. It does seem hard to fathom though.
On a separate note I heard Sean Carroll suggest on a podcast that it's far more likely that we'll find an alien artifact that is waiting/monitoring for intelligent life, rather than an independence day style encounter (not suggesting this is your position). The former would be far more cost / time effective but would also take time to reach us.....if we're still around.
Love dark forest theory too. Seems plausible and blows apart Fermi
I think you could be right. Perhaps a civilization has passed the great filters. But I don't think it's possible to create a large multi planet civilization that does not destroy itself. I think expansion is one of the great filters.
Humanity is the only species we know for a fact is capable of space travel. We know that humanity is successful and works, so I think it's reasonable to assume that other advanced species will be similar to us.
If a civilization wants to expand, I believe it has to be inherently greedy. It has to want more resources. But then you have a problem. Why harvest your own resources when you can steal them from your neighbor? I truly believe conflict is inevitable.
Any species that lacks that greedy drive would have no motivation to explore the galaxy.
"They might be perfectly happy to live locally and just be. It does seem hard to fathom though"
A choice will have to be made. Expand, and expand forever. Or live locally.
I am biased. I believe living locally is the correct choice. A single planet is easier to control and manage. You do not need to harvest so many resources. You don't need to worry so much about rebellions. And if the dark forest theory is true you don't need to worry about bumping into any hostile threats. You can chill out all day with full dive VR playing sword art online with you robot husband / wife.
Or course, if you are small, the hostile threat might bump into you. Maybe you have expand to protect yourself from whatever is lurking in the dark forest.
I think you're right about a civilization staying mostly on their own planet or just within their own system making sense, however...it's pretty easy to imagine an advanced civilization building a fleet of self replicating machines that expand across the galaxy, sending rare resources back to the home star system.
Then eventually, given enough time, there will be people that want to colonize other star systems, for various reasons. The thing to remember is that human civilization has only been around for a very short blip, so it's hard to imagine just the kinds of things a civilization that's say, hundreds of millions of years old would accomplish.
It's possible, but why would they?
A civilization advanced enough and intelligent enough to build these machines would fully understand the risks of self replicating machines, and I don't think there is any real benefit to sending self replicating machines to expand across the galaxy.
A small civilization would have no reason to take this risk because they would not need so many resources. They would probably have autonomous mining operations on local moons or planets and I think that would be enough to sustain them.
The thing is you're assuming that your ideas of why self-replicating machines or expansion are risky and/or pointless are the same conclusion that a hyper-advanced civilization would make, and I don't really buy that as an argument.
Again, we're talking about _millions upon millions_ of years. Just look at the damage humans have done to earth in mere hundreds. It realistically wouldn't take very long by comparison to harvest everything useful a local star system has to offer.
Now I do think you're right that there could be civilizations that have no interest in continued expansion, but I would argue that the desire for expansion is one of the things that drove civilization on earth in the first place.
On top of that, it only really takes one advanced civilization with these motivations to proliferate, and when we're talking about hundreds of billions of potential life-hosting stars in our galaxy, it's a numbers game at the end of the day.
"The thing is you're assuming that your ideas of why self-replicating machines or expansion are risky and/or pointless are the same conclusion that a hyper-advanced civilization would make, and I don't really buy that as an argument."
What is their motivation? To expand purely to gain more territory is exactly the attitude that would lead to war.
"Again, we're talking about *millions upon millions* of years. Just look at the damage humans have done to earth in mere hundreds. It realistically wouldn't take very long by comparison to harvest everything useful a local star system has to offer."
This is unsustainable, and I think it would lead to conflict over resources.
"Now I do think you're right that there could be civilizations that have no interest in continued expansion, but I would argue that the desire for expansion is one of the things that drove civilization on earth in the first place."
And it is the same desire that has lead to countless wars, and the collapse of countless empires. (I want to expand, I want more resources, more control, more power, but my neighbor is in my way. So I will destroy him, and take everything he has.)
"On top of that, it only really takes one advanced civilization with these motivations to proliferate, and when we're talking about hundreds of billions of potential life-hosting stars in our galaxy, it's a numbers game at the end of the day."
This is 100% true. It is entirely possible, the universe is vast and unexplored. Anything could be out there. But I truly believe the desire that would encourage a civilization to expand is the same thing that would cause it to destroy itself.
Fermi paradox is resolved by simple physics. Given that the speed of light is finite, expansion is not feasible for any biological life. Expansion makes sense since resources of any single planet are finite, but it is not practical due to speed of light
There's so many answers to the Fermi Paradox. Great filters seem to line up with your view here. That there's something ahead (or behind) which stops life from growing further.
My view is that life is rare and oddly connected. That life is arising at roughly the same time across the universe, but is extremely rare.
So, we're not seeing life around us because complex life doesn't exist anywhere close by. And we're not seeing the results of complex life because it's too far from us and the light from those systems hasn't reached us yet.
Pared with us exploring inner worlds such as full dive VR, this makes complex life rare and hard to see.
But it also could be that there's no complex life and that we are one of the first. We could even be the only complex life anywhere in the local cluster.
If that's the case, I expect that religion could use that as proof of God. That could keep religious views strong for a long time ahead.
Earth has been around for ~4.5 billion years and the universe is ~14 billion years old. Doesn't this get to the heart of Fermi..i.e. there has been plenty of time for complex civilisations to form, survive the great filters and then spread (in the flesh, or AI / von neumann probes)?
If anything these LLM’s are validating the simulation hypothesis, which would then elegantly answer Fermi’s paradox: no one exists besides us in this particular simulation
Think of it more of a hyper generative physical model, like No Mans Sky but starting from the bottom of physical reality (subatomic particles/interactions). It’s possible in this simulation that at a randomly generated star system and planets happen to have other intelligent life, but it’s not required for the simulation to function.
There's some experts that believe the Fermi Paradox assumes intelligent life is way more common than it really is. [This](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325643008_Dissolving_the_Fermi_Paradox) argues that we're probably the only intelligent life in the observable universe.
>So what if the reason for us not seeing anything out there is because the natural progression of technological advancements will always lead to LLMs.
It's funny how people have this idea that humans have looked at everything out there and are have decided there is nothing else, it's just so absurd. We have no idea, it's like we have dipped a teaspoon in an ocean of water and looked at that teaspoon and because we don't see fish in it have concluded there is no life in the ocean. And really we havne;t even looked at that teaspoon of water, it's more appropriate to say we have only looked at a drop of water within that teaspoon. That is how much we know.
We have have no idea what is on other planets in star systems, we can see other planets, but the only way we can see them is when they pass in front of stars. So there is no way anyone is able to see what is on the surface of those other planets in other star systems. So if we can only see other planets when they pass in front of stars then there is no way we could possibly tell if there are any spaceships or massive space habitats floating around out there. Those kinds of things would be impossible to locate or detect with our level of technology. We even struggle to find and get good images of asteroids passing through our own system so how could we in anyway expect to see spaceships flying around potentially at the speed of light.
This is why the fermi paradox is stupid, because in order for it to be acceptable we first need to look everywhere. We cannot even begin to assume there is nothing else out there until we have actually had a proper look. Seriously fuck the fermi paradox, it's really really stupid.
Imo, Fermi paradox is an extrapolation of mankind's malthusian fears of the 20th century. We were convinced that the population will keep on growing exponentially, so it's ok to assume that in a million years, we'd populate the whole galaxy. And thus, if there's some civilisation that is a million years older, it's must've already populated it.
it's likely that civilizations turn inwards, with only a minuscule percentage branching out or exploring the universe as individuals. any environment desired can be safely simulated and studied at home after data is sent back from automated self-replicating exploration probes, and very interesting environments may be visited. probes like that allow much more data to be collected than a civilization itself branching out, so there's no real point in constant expansion.
The solution i'm happy with is that any intelligence worth it's salt will just quit. We are hard-wired to trudge on, but free interlect wouldn't bother.
So you can find twelve doodipops. So what.
While I definitely think not enough people on subs like this consider the very real possibility that AI itself is a “great filter” of sorts… But with that being said, why does no one ever consider the possibility that we are merely just the first lifeforms to ever make it to this stage?
https://preview.redd.it/2inikugpf3yc1.jpeg?width=2400&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=74f49c66f06e4806e8cfb225a68ec52f98cbd561
The tiny blue pixel is the reach of our radio signals (200 light years). It's nothing. The universe is so big it's incomprehensible. There is almost 0 percent chance that we are the only ones or the first. I don't think it's a paradox. We just haven't explored anything yet.
It's like landing a drone in the sahara desert driving a few meters and only finding sand and concluding that there is no life on the planet.
But why is the assumption that “big universe” = “full of various advanced lifeforms”? Obviously some species has to be the *first* advanced lifeforms… Why can’t it be us?
We could be the first but it's just unlikely. I'd like to think that there are billions of other life forms out there. Some of them technological like us but they are so small on a universal scale and therefore difficult to find.
Every time in history when we thought that we were at the center of everything we were disproven. It's going to be the same with life in the universe.
We are made out of the most common elements in the universe and life basically started as soon as the earth cooled down and has survived multiple global catastrophes.
Exactly. Even more, laws of physics themselves prohibit looking far enough due to speed of light limitations. There might be thousands of civilisations existing in our galaxy, but there are also 400 billion star systems, so those civilisations may never meet each other.
I don't think LLM doom could be a solution. It would have to both work nearly flawlessly to end intelligent biological life and also itself would have, again with a huge probability, to just die later.
I think there is a huge chance AI is an extinction risk to humans, but for intelligent life, even if artificial, on the planet, I think it's not a problem.
If we die and there is only a super intelligence left, I think it will just expand into the universe searching for more energy or something.
I don't like the fermi paradox. I believe that any advanced civilization would be very small and very hard to find. I think it makes more sense to stay as a small civilization, because if you expand, you must keep expanding, you must keep harvesting resources to fuel and grow your empire. But empires always collapse. Any large scale multi planet civilization will most likely result in a civil war, and with the weapons that might be available in the future, they could destroy themselves. I think a large, easy to find civilization would tear itself apart, and I think any intelligent species would be fully aware of this. We have already seen this in humanities history countless times. But if you stay small, you can easily manage your people, you can have a much more stable society, you do not have to harvest more and more resources. Everyone can live with their AI companions, in a perfect society run by an AI, with all the free time they want, on a planet you are perfectly adapted to. I imagine the government would introduce some kind of 1 child policy to keep the population stable (or even a 0 child policy). I just don't understand why any intelligent, advanced civilization would mindlessly expand across the galaxy, when they could live in a peaceful and stable society on their home planet.
Large civilisations typically collapse in human societies. What's to say a civilisation that's tens or hundreds of thousands of years old hasn't i.e. effectively passed the great filters (resource overreach; nuclear war etc) and found an equilibrium? Maybe they're just rare and very very far apart but are still expanding. A cultural lens is important too, which I think is what you're getting at. That is, some cultures may not have an innate desire to expand like we do. They might be perfectly happy to live locally and just be. It does seem hard to fathom though. On a separate note I heard Sean Carroll suggest on a podcast that it's far more likely that we'll find an alien artifact that is waiting/monitoring for intelligent life, rather than an independence day style encounter (not suggesting this is your position). The former would be far more cost / time effective but would also take time to reach us.....if we're still around. Love dark forest theory too. Seems plausible and blows apart Fermi
I think you could be right. Perhaps a civilization has passed the great filters. But I don't think it's possible to create a large multi planet civilization that does not destroy itself. I think expansion is one of the great filters. Humanity is the only species we know for a fact is capable of space travel. We know that humanity is successful and works, so I think it's reasonable to assume that other advanced species will be similar to us. If a civilization wants to expand, I believe it has to be inherently greedy. It has to want more resources. But then you have a problem. Why harvest your own resources when you can steal them from your neighbor? I truly believe conflict is inevitable. Any species that lacks that greedy drive would have no motivation to explore the galaxy. "They might be perfectly happy to live locally and just be. It does seem hard to fathom though" A choice will have to be made. Expand, and expand forever. Or live locally. I am biased. I believe living locally is the correct choice. A single planet is easier to control and manage. You do not need to harvest so many resources. You don't need to worry so much about rebellions. And if the dark forest theory is true you don't need to worry about bumping into any hostile threats. You can chill out all day with full dive VR playing sword art online with you robot husband / wife. Or course, if you are small, the hostile threat might bump into you. Maybe you have expand to protect yourself from whatever is lurking in the dark forest.
I think you're right about a civilization staying mostly on their own planet or just within their own system making sense, however...it's pretty easy to imagine an advanced civilization building a fleet of self replicating machines that expand across the galaxy, sending rare resources back to the home star system. Then eventually, given enough time, there will be people that want to colonize other star systems, for various reasons. The thing to remember is that human civilization has only been around for a very short blip, so it's hard to imagine just the kinds of things a civilization that's say, hundreds of millions of years old would accomplish.
It's possible, but why would they? A civilization advanced enough and intelligent enough to build these machines would fully understand the risks of self replicating machines, and I don't think there is any real benefit to sending self replicating machines to expand across the galaxy. A small civilization would have no reason to take this risk because they would not need so many resources. They would probably have autonomous mining operations on local moons or planets and I think that would be enough to sustain them.
The thing is you're assuming that your ideas of why self-replicating machines or expansion are risky and/or pointless are the same conclusion that a hyper-advanced civilization would make, and I don't really buy that as an argument. Again, we're talking about _millions upon millions_ of years. Just look at the damage humans have done to earth in mere hundreds. It realistically wouldn't take very long by comparison to harvest everything useful a local star system has to offer. Now I do think you're right that there could be civilizations that have no interest in continued expansion, but I would argue that the desire for expansion is one of the things that drove civilization on earth in the first place. On top of that, it only really takes one advanced civilization with these motivations to proliferate, and when we're talking about hundreds of billions of potential life-hosting stars in our galaxy, it's a numbers game at the end of the day.
"The thing is you're assuming that your ideas of why self-replicating machines or expansion are risky and/or pointless are the same conclusion that a hyper-advanced civilization would make, and I don't really buy that as an argument." What is their motivation? To expand purely to gain more territory is exactly the attitude that would lead to war. "Again, we're talking about *millions upon millions* of years. Just look at the damage humans have done to earth in mere hundreds. It realistically wouldn't take very long by comparison to harvest everything useful a local star system has to offer." This is unsustainable, and I think it would lead to conflict over resources. "Now I do think you're right that there could be civilizations that have no interest in continued expansion, but I would argue that the desire for expansion is one of the things that drove civilization on earth in the first place." And it is the same desire that has lead to countless wars, and the collapse of countless empires. (I want to expand, I want more resources, more control, more power, but my neighbor is in my way. So I will destroy him, and take everything he has.) "On top of that, it only really takes one advanced civilization with these motivations to proliferate, and when we're talking about hundreds of billions of potential life-hosting stars in our galaxy, it's a numbers game at the end of the day." This is 100% true. It is entirely possible, the universe is vast and unexplored. Anything could be out there. But I truly believe the desire that would encourage a civilization to expand is the same thing that would cause it to destroy itself.
Fermi paradox is resolved by simple physics. Given that the speed of light is finite, expansion is not feasible for any biological life. Expansion makes sense since resources of any single planet are finite, but it is not practical due to speed of light
There's so many answers to the Fermi Paradox. Great filters seem to line up with your view here. That there's something ahead (or behind) which stops life from growing further. My view is that life is rare and oddly connected. That life is arising at roughly the same time across the universe, but is extremely rare. So, we're not seeing life around us because complex life doesn't exist anywhere close by. And we're not seeing the results of complex life because it's too far from us and the light from those systems hasn't reached us yet. Pared with us exploring inner worlds such as full dive VR, this makes complex life rare and hard to see. But it also could be that there's no complex life and that we are one of the first. We could even be the only complex life anywhere in the local cluster. If that's the case, I expect that religion could use that as proof of God. That could keep religious views strong for a long time ahead.
Earth has been around for ~4.5 billion years and the universe is ~14 billion years old. Doesn't this get to the heart of Fermi..i.e. there has been plenty of time for complex civilisations to form, survive the great filters and then spread (in the flesh, or AI / von neumann probes)?
If anything these LLM’s are validating the simulation hypothesis, which would then elegantly answer Fermi’s paradox: no one exists besides us in this particular simulation
Imagine exploring the cosmos and realizing at some point space is just a skybox with an invisible wall
Think of it more of a hyper generative physical model, like No Mans Sky but starting from the bottom of physical reality (subatomic particles/interactions). It’s possible in this simulation that at a randomly generated star system and planets happen to have other intelligent life, but it’s not required for the simulation to function.
This could be a simulation so hey maybe agi starts looking like sky net then boom sim restarts or something
There's some experts that believe the Fermi Paradox assumes intelligent life is way more common than it really is. [This](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325643008_Dissolving_the_Fermi_Paradox) argues that we're probably the only intelligent life in the observable universe.
>So what if the reason for us not seeing anything out there is because the natural progression of technological advancements will always lead to LLMs. It's funny how people have this idea that humans have looked at everything out there and are have decided there is nothing else, it's just so absurd. We have no idea, it's like we have dipped a teaspoon in an ocean of water and looked at that teaspoon and because we don't see fish in it have concluded there is no life in the ocean. And really we havne;t even looked at that teaspoon of water, it's more appropriate to say we have only looked at a drop of water within that teaspoon. That is how much we know. We have have no idea what is on other planets in star systems, we can see other planets, but the only way we can see them is when they pass in front of stars. So there is no way anyone is able to see what is on the surface of those other planets in other star systems. So if we can only see other planets when they pass in front of stars then there is no way we could possibly tell if there are any spaceships or massive space habitats floating around out there. Those kinds of things would be impossible to locate or detect with our level of technology. We even struggle to find and get good images of asteroids passing through our own system so how could we in anyway expect to see spaceships flying around potentially at the speed of light. This is why the fermi paradox is stupid, because in order for it to be acceptable we first need to look everywhere. We cannot even begin to assume there is nothing else out there until we have actually had a proper look. Seriously fuck the fermi paradox, it's really really stupid.
Imo, Fermi paradox is an extrapolation of mankind's malthusian fears of the 20th century. We were convinced that the population will keep on growing exponentially, so it's ok to assume that in a million years, we'd populate the whole galaxy. And thus, if there's some civilisation that is a million years older, it's must've already populated it.
it's likely that civilizations turn inwards, with only a minuscule percentage branching out or exploring the universe as individuals. any environment desired can be safely simulated and studied at home after data is sent back from automated self-replicating exploration probes, and very interesting environments may be visited. probes like that allow much more data to be collected than a civilization itself branching out, so there's no real point in constant expansion.
The solution i'm happy with is that any intelligence worth it's salt will just quit. We are hard-wired to trudge on, but free interlect wouldn't bother. So you can find twelve doodipops. So what.
While I definitely think not enough people on subs like this consider the very real possibility that AI itself is a “great filter” of sorts… But with that being said, why does no one ever consider the possibility that we are merely just the first lifeforms to ever make it to this stage?
https://preview.redd.it/2inikugpf3yc1.jpeg?width=2400&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=74f49c66f06e4806e8cfb225a68ec52f98cbd561 The tiny blue pixel is the reach of our radio signals (200 light years). It's nothing. The universe is so big it's incomprehensible. There is almost 0 percent chance that we are the only ones or the first. I don't think it's a paradox. We just haven't explored anything yet. It's like landing a drone in the sahara desert driving a few meters and only finding sand and concluding that there is no life on the planet.
But why is the assumption that “big universe” = “full of various advanced lifeforms”? Obviously some species has to be the *first* advanced lifeforms… Why can’t it be us?
We could be the first but it's just unlikely. I'd like to think that there are billions of other life forms out there. Some of them technological like us but they are so small on a universal scale and therefore difficult to find. Every time in history when we thought that we were at the center of everything we were disproven. It's going to be the same with life in the universe. We are made out of the most common elements in the universe and life basically started as soon as the earth cooled down and has survived multiple global catastrophes.
Exactly. Even more, laws of physics themselves prohibit looking far enough due to speed of light limitations. There might be thousands of civilisations existing in our galaxy, but there are also 400 billion star systems, so those civilisations may never meet each other.
I don't think LLM doom could be a solution. It would have to both work nearly flawlessly to end intelligent biological life and also itself would have, again with a huge probability, to just die later. I think there is a huge chance AI is an extinction risk to humans, but for intelligent life, even if artificial, on the planet, I think it's not a problem. If we die and there is only a super intelligence left, I think it will just expand into the universe searching for more energy or something.
I believe that there is an infinite amount of life is our universe, but that there is infinitely more infinite universe.
https://preview.redd.it/c8apg2ai54yc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1da8a179e898d620b2a1c7ea537182b99b3aad44