Fermi's Paradox and the 'Prime Directive'?

Great Debates
21

Well, maybe. Or perhaps they have developed enough intraspecies and ecological ethics to keep from destroying themselves but are extremely xenophobic about life from other worlds. Or perhaps we’re in the way of a cosmic construction project which would improve their civilization, and they had no more interest in preserving ours than we would about preserving a termite colony.

Or perhaps we are truly unique and no other civilizations have arisen, or those that have inevitably self-destruct. Given the tiny volume of the observable universe, or even of our galaxy, that we can directly observe to any useful extent, we really can’t draw anything other than speculation. But there would appear to be no physical reason why CHONPS-based life couldn’t develop elsewhere, and no reason to think that the evolutionary peaks life on Earth has swam, crawled, walked, and flown to couldn’t be achieved in some parallel developments.

Stranger

22

Nice post k9bfriender, I agree entirely. I would just add this though:

Yes but we already have some reason to disfavor that explanation, since humans are, in astronomical terms, an eyeblink from being interstellar. The train’s coming into the station right now, and we still don’t see anything that is going to impede it in any way.

23

But “megastructures” and the like doesn’t need to explicitly be about the Kardeshev scale. The point is, we don’t see any detectable structures, probes or megascale alterations of any kind. So it’s not “Why aren’t aliens following this prescribed path we are imagining for them?” it’s more “Why has no species ever done anything on a large scale?”

24

We don’t know that “No species ever done anything on a large scale,” just none that we’ve been able to observe from our one vantage point in the hinterlands of our galaxy; much of the galaxy is actually occluded by dust and the entire “Zone of Avoidance” curtains off nearly half the galaxy. A truly effective megastructure make actually occlude an entire star, so unless we were able to detect it via gravitational effects we wouldn’t even know it is there, and if civilizations and interstellar travel are common, it may even make sense to conceal the presence of a potentially competing civilization (although what they could possibly compete over is another question entirely).

While we may assume megastructures are a logical conclusion of a more technologically advanced civilization, they might be the equivalent of Victorians assuming that intercontinental travel would be via city-sized sea vessels or airships instead of compact winged aircraft capable of flying between continents in a few hours, or that a modern computer would be the size of several city blocks instead of able to fit in your pocket. Regardless of technical sophistication, building planet-sized megastructures is a lot of physical work, and if a civilization has access to alternative means of power, and is able to make their civilization compact instead of expansive (e.g. by “downloading” their cognition into some medium) the entire notion of building massive structures would seem as anachronistic to them as communicating by signal fires seems to us.

Without any observational data each way, and only our own, yet to travel beyond the Earth’s sphere of influence civilization to base any estimate on, we just can’t make even an informed speculation much less a credible guestimate. Civilizations may arise nearby and self-destruct with regularity prior to building megastructures, or may transition beyond any ability we could have of detecting or communicating with them, or any of a number of other reasons not to build great swarms or giant structures, and we would have no ability to observe them. The Star Trek thesis that one or more alien civilizations are surveilling us but refraining from contact because of some kind of ethical prohibition is the least likely explanation.

Stranger

25

Of course we don’t know, but it’s essentially a microcosm of the whole fermi paradox: it’s pointing out an important known-unknown.

There are plenty of suppositions we can come up with for why we don’t see large scale structures or probes.
Maybe no species ever has any reason to make something that large? Maybe megastructures exist, but are all undetectable to us? Or maybe no advanced species exist, period.

Either way, it’s not something we know about, and so the observation that we can see a huge volume of the cosmos and don’t see any evidence for such structures is significant.

No, again you’re going back to Kardashev. I’m saying we don’t see any evidence of any kind of artificial structure, for any purpose.

And this argument also doesn’t apply to things like space probes.

Agreed. As I say, even if the prime directive argument worked (and I don’t think it does), you need every individual of every advanced species to always draw that same conclusion, including when they were barely more advanced than we are right now. This seems implausible compared to other possible explanations.

26

While I agree that aliens watching us without contacting us is an unlikely explanation, we also shouldn’t get into a Men in Black sort of mindset where lots of aliens are attracted to Earth for some reason. Star travel, if even possible, is going to be expensive, and it seems more likely that only one alien civilization will come, take a look, go away, and write “mostly harmless” in their report.
Thinking we’re the center of the universe, even if metaphorically, is an easy trap to fall into.

27

I wasn’t suggesting anyone expressly coming to Earth; I’m alluding to things like replicating probes that may visit a large number of star systems.

28

I agree. Megastructures seem to assume enough bodies to put into them, and it seems likely that any civilization advanced enough to build one would also control its population enough to not need one.
Loading cognition into something seems a plausible solution. Such entities would be nearly immortal, wouldn’t breed much if at all, and would have totally different goals than biology based entities. It would seem a plausible next step in evolution. Who knows, building a model of the brain inside a computer might be easier than developing true AI, does stuff for the builders, and eliminates the nasty machines taking over problem.

29

And the chance that even one of those would have visited while we would notice it is vanishingly small. The ethics I proposed above would say that they wouldn’t tear apart inhabited solar systems for new components and fuel. There are certainly plenty of uninhabited ones. (By inhabited I mean any life, not just intelligent life.)

30

Really, what is that based on? We are not aware of any reason why they wouldn’t become a plague, there’s certainly plenty of resources in a typical star system to make millions of the things.

But that’s not a solution to the problem. I was talking about the possibility of detecting such probes, not of necessarily seeing them land on Earth.

31

I’m only worrying about them coming here. When we can image nearby star systems better than we can now we might be able to detect if any of them have been munched by probes. Ours hasn’t. And there has been roughly 10 billion years for some to do it. (Not in ours, in some system or other.)

I’m not disputing the possibility that some probes have passed by some time in the past. We just wouldn’t know about it. We would if they replicated in our system, though.

32

Indeed, even our many of our industrial societies have reduced birthrates to below replacement value without any intentional mandate at all. We have traditionally pressed for high birthrates first because of mortality in the pre-industrial and early industrial eras, but once there is both a reduced child mortality combined with the potential for economic advancement, having a large family to support becomes a burden rather than a benefit. A future civilization, able to essentially engineer their population for attributes geared for success, e.g. intelligence, sociability, innovation, charisma, et cetera, and with sufficient automation to not need population for physical or rote intellectual labor will have no need for a large population just to get the occasional member at the top end of the statistical distribution; they can simply select for high performing individuals by default.

“Building a model of a brain” is probably the actually route toward something like ‘artificial’ intelligence. One thing we can be almost certain of is that however digital machine cognition develops, it will not think or perceive like we do, and thus, will not fit the role of a true companion or replacement, and will not provide continuity with our society.

Some cognitive form which is based upon improvement from human brains will at least have a comparable basis of experience of the external world. I expect synthetic ‘brains’ will be architected much like our current nervous system (and not at all like a digital computer as we would recognized them), even if they use an entirely different substrate. Such cognition, freed of the limits of evolutionary biology, may be able to have an indefinite experience and directly communicate with one another, but able to be maintained in a more compact and durable fashion without the messy business of our metabolism. Or, that may not be entirely possible and such creatures will still need some kind of body but not need the support of agriculture and other complex and delicate connections to the larger ecosystem to sustain them.

In any case, the need for large living spaces or illuminated tracts for traditional agriculture are probably not required for an advanced civilization, nor should we assume they are necessary for collecting energy from the central star. If an advanced civilization requires macroscale structures that could be observed across vast interstellar distances, it is probably because they are at a thermodynamic limit of information storage, or because they are conducting some feat of cosmic engineering, or some other motivation that we could only guess at, and there is no reason to believe that they are an obligate phase in technological development.

Stranger

33

There are two possibilities. We can create new intelligences in these artificial brains, which would lead to the problems you mention. And I bet they’d never even send Fathers’ Day cards or call us. Or we can scan ourselves and load that into the brain. Which leaves the old one behind, which is interesting. To be a good model we’d need to simulate inputs from our senses also, and perhaps even our hormone system.
I agree that the interests of these downloaded intelligences would be different from ours, but our interests are different from that of the Romans.
Even more interesting would be the enhancements we can make. More and faster (and more reliable) memory. Why can’t we think in four dimensions? Can that be fixed?
I suspect that, in the future, death will be nature’s way of telling you that you didn’t back yourself up.

34

I’m not sure it really does. Finely tuned small numbers, sure, but small numbers, there’s no problem with that.

We only know the numerator on the odds, the “one in” part. The denominator, “in x”, we do not know. That denominator may be huge. If it’s Grahams’s Number, then we should expect to be the only technological civilization within the observable universe, and pretty substantially beyond. If the chances of looking at any bubble the size of our observable universe, and finding technological life in it is tremendously small, then the only ones that would have any chance of finding it would be that technological life itself.

The fallacy involved in the Law of Small Numbers is seeing a sample size, and determining the denominator there to be small enough to account for the result, but no smaller.

And that’s where the fine tuning fallacy of the Law of Small numbers comes into play. It requires fine tuning to say that the chances of technological civilizations are high enough that there are a bunch out there, but small enough that we cannot come into contact with them.

The Fermi Paradox is not about communicating, it is about detecting their presence at all. Why is the Solar system not littered with Von Neuman probes, why has it not been mined out? Why are there stars in the sky, rather than blobs that only radiate in the infrared as they are encased in Dyson swarms?

A solution to the Fermi Paradox needs to explain why we will not ever do these things, or explain why we are unique in that we would.

It may be that we die out before we accomplish any of this. Sad, but possible. It may be that we find new laws of physics that allow us to create matter and energy from nothing, and not need to exploit the resources of the galaxy to fuel our every growing desire for more expansion. This would be awesome, but I find it unlikely.

The idea that we would have the capability of expanding into and exploiting the resources of the galaxy, but choose not to, I find the least likely of all. There are no known laws of physics that would stop us from doing so, and we are already taking the first tiny steps in a journey that will have us populating the entire galaxy within a few dozen million years, at most.

To counter this means that one has to explain why not some, not most, but all other alien civilizations would not take this route.

I agree, and that’s more or less my point. In these discussions, I usually preface that with “at least” a few billion light years, as I think that it’s probably much, much higher than that. The point is, though, that a few billion light years is the minimum, IMHO. Otherwise, we would see galaxies dimming out into the infrared, as they get colonized by their inhabitants.

A hundred million years is nothing on universal timescales, and there are around 150 galaxies and a thousand dwarf galaxies within a hundred million light years, even a billion years isn’t that long, and that gets us tens of thousands of galaxies. If any of them had life with the capabilities and motivations of mankind, then we would see at least some of them being “terraformed*” by now.

That’s why I put a lower limit as a few billion light years to the next technological civilization. I actually think it is much higher than that.

It is also worth noting that the universe is actually pretty young. It seems old to us, and relative to human timescales, it is. But to the projected lifespan of the universe, it’s barely an infant. The majority of those 200 billion stars you mention will be burning for a few hundred billion years. Most of them will become more habitable over time, as their stars settle down. The Earth only really has less than another billion years of being in the habitable zone of our Sun, as it heats up. Red dwarfs are also slowly heating up, but at a much slower rate, where a planet may spend tens of billions of years in the habitable zone. A planet around a red dwarf may be frozen solid right now, but in fifty billion years, find itself in a more comfortable climate, a climate that will be sustained for several times longer than the entire lifetime of the Sun. Give it a bit of time, and I think that that is where the vast majority of life, along with technological life, will arise.

In any case, someone has got to be first. And whoever that is will look out into a seemingly empty universe, and wonder where everyone else is.

*terraformed is not a great word for shaping a galaxy into a more useful and efficient form, but I’m not sure what word would apply there.

35

We are the only ones who can stop us, IMHO, at this point.

Whether it is in the next few weeks and months as our civilization falls apart and we launch nukes at everyone, or in five hundred years when an interplanetary war kills everyone.

I don’t rule it out as a solution to the Fermi Paradox. In order to leave your planet, much less your solar system, requires having access to quite a bit of power, and having that power spread to quite a number of people and entities.

There are a number of filters one has to overcome before the galaxy is theirs, and we don’t know what hurdles lay before us.

It is possible that countless civilizations have gotten to our point, or even further, only to wipe themselves out. That’s why the most horrific thing that I can think of detecting would be another civilization, a few dozen or maybe a hundred light years away, and decoding their signal to find their version of “I Love Lucy.” I think that that would pretty much seal our fate. It would indicate that our level of civilization is very common, and that the next step is not.

But who knows, maybe we will be the first to clear this last hurdle as well. One can be optimistic.

36

As I’ve learned more about cognitive neuroscience and the biophysics of neural interactions, I’ve become increasingly skeptical about the ability to ‘scan’ a human (or other biological) consciousness into a simulacrum running on top of a digital computer architecture. Setting aside physical problems of scanning a conscious brain (of which no one can really even explain what they mean; e.g. would you have to scan down to the cellular level and capture potentiation states, or perhaps even down to the level of individual proteins and peptides, and how could you record all of this information simultaneously enough to ‘capture’ anything close to an instantaneous state of consciousness?) there is the issue of reproducing the effective computational speed of neurological operations with the limitations of digital computation. And while I’ve been dismissive in the past of consciousness being an inherently quantum phenomenon (e.g. Roger Penrose’s Orch-OR thesis) based upon the impossibility of maintaining coherent quantum states in the “hot, wet media” of living tissue, the growing field of quantum biology has hypothesized and to an extent experimentally demonstrated that quantum processes do occur in certain biological processes and are likely only the tip of the iceburg in the field.

So, I suspect any synthetic cognition that thinks ‘like us’, or that could potentially reproduce some facsimile of an existing human consciousness would have to be architected like the human brain even if it used some other substrate, including reproducing neural mechanisms well below the level of conscious ‘neural circuitry’, and including, as you note, inputs that would simulate sensory input and the various responses of the endocrine and other critical neural systems.

We certainly have different sociological conditioning than Romans (or Greeks, or Parthians, or any other well-separated group in history) but we all fundamentally had the same neural structures and sensory inputs. A novel machine ‘consciousness’ would almost certainly have a totally different conceptual construction of the world in addition to not being driven by hormones and emotional affect. It is hard to say how such a consciousness would regard us or if it would even be possible to instill a sense of human ethics into it.

The human brain is actually quite plastic–after all, nearly all modern humans learn to read written language, and this is a technology that is not found anywhere in nature, even among other creatures that may use complex communication–and I know a number of physicists who claim to be able to visualize phenomena in four dimensions. (I myself cannot, or at least not to a degree that provides any novel insights.) But there are definitely limits to human cognition and memory, although some of those may be quite functional and adaptive. The fluidity of memory, for instance, provides the ability to dull the pain of bad events and modify emotional responses ; if you had perfect and persistent recall of a great trauma, you might just be subject to disabling cycles of recall and reliving the event, and indeed, people with eidetic memory often present this as a downside of such perfect recall.

But it isn’t clear that we are in any way unique. The essential elements in our chemical makeup are found in pretty much any region with a suitable density of Population I stars. The amino acids that are the key structures in peptides and nucleotides are found in spectral traces of interstellar clouds. And water, the essential solvent for all life on Earth, appears present all over our solar system and very likely elsewhere in the universe. At one time the assumption that life, or at least complex life, would only form on ‘Earth-like’ terrestrial worlds with in a suitable ‘Goldilocks’ zone from their central star that would permit liquid surface water, but the current speculation on the issue is that Jovian-type moons are potentially an even more likely and stable cradle for life. There are no operations in the metabolism of living tissues that would be physically unique to conditions on Earth, and it seems almost implausible that given sufficient time and opportunity analogous systems wouldn’t spontaneously evolve elsewhere as conditions permit. Whether that would inevitably evolve through various bottlenecks into more complex lifeforms capable of something comparable to human civilization is a total unknown, but in absence of any evidence indicating that our particular environment was in some way totally unique in even our own interstellar neighborhood, it would seem virtually inevitable that civilizations could and would arise throughout the vast tapestry of potentially habitable environments in the over 200 billion stars in our galaxy.

As for “Why is the Solar system not littered with Von Neuman probes, why has it not been mined out? Why are there stars in the sky, rather than blobs that only radiate in the infrared as they are encased in Dyson swarms?”: these questions still reflect the underlying assumption that of course some technologically advanced civilization would send out self-replicating probes or build Dyson swarms around their star to collect energy. And again, these reflect our particular thinking on the matter of future technologies, which are limited by what we know and experience today.

A future human civilization will (hopefully) learn to direction control the nuclear forces, or create topological defects in space that permit fine control over Einstein gravity, or tap into the energy of the quantum vacuum state, or other physics that we cannot even guess at. The notion fo sending probes to explore other star systems or collecting the paltry amount of energy given out by a star may seem like quaint notions akin to a mid-19th century denizen of the United States assuming that the future of transportation would be ever more railroads or horses bred for improved stamina rather than ‘automobiles’ propelled by internal combustion engines running on petroleum oil extracted from the ground. An advanced civilization may have access to energies far beyond the irradiance that even a very bright star puts out, and may view “exploration” as something to be done by probing the inner workings of physics rather than cataloguing the array of stars reachable by probes only after centuries or millennia of travel, and to no end that enriches the civilization that sent it except in astronomical data.

Stranger

37

Those paradigms changed because of improvements in technology. They didn’t have flight, they didn’t have transistors.

What you are talking about is a complete change to our understanding of physics. That we would develop over unity power generation and matter fabrication.

Not really, and it would be almost entirely automated. You don’t build it all at once, and it would not be a single entity that did so. If you can set up shop on Mercury, and start producing solar panels, then so can a dozen other companies. It would not be a collective effort to create a Dyson swarm to enclose the star, it would be the effort of individuals or small groups looking to exploit the resources for their own profit.

Even if we were all running on silicon (or other such computing substrate), we would still want more. More memory storage, more processing power, and more energy to run it.

Also, if we are in such a state, we may find ourselves looking long term, very long term. To us mere mortal beings, the stars in the sky look like diamonds glittering in the dark. To an immortals that is thinking about the next few trillion years, they look like burring oil wells that need to be extinguished and capped, as they are wasting enormous amounts of power that could keep us warm for many trillions of years after the stars have gone out.

A rational long lived species would start going around putting stars out.

There are also threats. If there are a whole bunch of civilizations that have turned inward, and have chosen not to expand, they will still protect themselves. If there is a star that is nearing them that is going to go supernova and damage their solar system when it does, then they will have motive to go out to that star and do some form of astroforming or maneuvering. A Dyson swarm radiating in infrared may be difficult to detect, but a shkadov thruster should be visible from half across the galaxy.

I’ll agree that it’s all speculation, but I don’t know that it’s completely uninformed. We can see other stars, we do know that we can at least get material off the Earth. How we get from point A to B is quite a bit of technological and engineering work, but the path is not completely obscured.

Sadly, I think that that is too likely to be the case.

We can only speculate using the physics that we do know. If we have to start postulating based on the physics that we don’t know, then we really can go no where.

It is not enough to say why some civilizations would not do this, in order to explain the Fermi paradox, you have to say why no civilization would.

This I agree with 99.97%

38

I think that they’d be more interested in the resources in the asteroid belt than the fungal infection covering the third planet from the star.

39

Why would we need to control our population? We do need to put some controls on our population when we have limited resources, but if we have the resources to grow, why wouldn’t we?

Also assuming that we have very long lives, or even effectively immortals, unless no one wants to reproduce, we are looking at a growing population.

Unless such entities have absolutely no interest in any form of growth or expansion, then that doesn’t really explain why they wouldn’t be growing and expanding.

If some of them don’t want to grow and expand, then as long as any subset of them does, or a subset comes around that does, then they will eventually outnumber the ones that don’t.

40

Maybe they leave an inhabited planet alone, but why the whole solar system?

At what point do they decide to leave an inhabited system alone? If there is any sign of microbial life, multicellular life, or intelligent life?

Earth and our solar system sat here for 4 billion years before anything larger than a single cell managed to make its way up the tree of life.

Slightly different topic, but I think that the best way for that to go is that we start augmenting our natural capabilities with electronic ones. As we do so, eventually more and more of our cognition, memories, and sense of self move into the machine. At some point, when the connection is severed briefly, you would feel more that your meat node has been disconnected than as though your cyber side has been. At that point, if your body dies, it’s a loss of a node, maybe with a bit of sentimental value, but you would not consider it to be the death of you.

Probably, but those interests seem that they would lend themselves towards growth and expansion. As you say

Is there a time when we will decide that our memory is fast and expansive enough?

Even if we are not growing in the number of individuals, which I think that we would, as each individual would have a unique perspective to contribute to the whole, each individual would still be seeking to increase their own capabilities.

Sure, why not? A computer can compute in four dimensions just fine, it’s trying to make that into a visual that we can comprehend that is problematic. If computing is thinking, then thinking in multiple dimensions is no more difficult than doing math in multiple dimensions.

Back yourself up… enough. If we want to live forever, then we will need as many backups as possible. Which means using more and more resources.

There is also the fact that, in the far, far, far future, death will be nature’s way of telling you that you ran out of power. If we want to maintain our individual selves as long as possible, we need to start collecting resources and stop wasting so much power on having stars shining bright out into the endless void.