This “conceit” makes some assumptions, and it’s impossible to be sure whether they’re good ones, but these assumptions seem reasonable to me:
-intelligent species will eventually develop the means to settle elsewhere
-at least some members of the species are individuals with individual and varying desires (even for a hive species or similar - some of the hives may have different desires)
-some of those individuals will eventually want to go somewhere else
That’s the big one, I think., Why will they? What about a species where the desire to be close to their fellows is just that much stronger than any competing desire for discovery? This doesn’t preclude individuality or even large groups traveling, but does preclude any form of solo- or small-group adventuring into the unknown.
Or, as I said before, they will not want to go elsewhere because they all have an enough-is-enough mentality. Any of them that doesn’t, is considered insane and certainly isn’t going to be allowed anywhere near their (highly advanced) spaceships.
I don’t think this works.
Let’s take another tech.
Humans today cannot build a dark matter gun. So it would be true that an industrial civilization superior to ours would be required to make such a thing (well, not strictly true, but basically speaking for the sake of argument).
However that would not entail that a dark matter gun must therefore encapsulate within it all the technology of a whole (advanced) civilization. For all we know, a dark matter gun is trivial to construct and the difficulty lies in obtaining the requisite knowledge.
I think the conflation some might be making is because a self replicating probe includes fabrication, so it feels a bit more like it’s encapsulating a whole industry. But it isn’t: it only needs to do the things relevant to being and constructing a self replicating probe.
Even if you’re right for 99.9% (or whatever), wouldn’t it only take 0.1% variation every few thousand years for expansion to be inevitable?
To make a dark matter gun in a distant solar system would certainly require a technological civilisation of some considerable sophistication, unless it could be made simply by banging rocks together. Since no-one knows how to make a dark matter gun, I can’t be sure that the banging-rocks-together strategy would be inadequate.
But to make an interstellar space probe capable of reaching another solar system and then self-repping on arrival would definitely require a very sophisticated industrial complex. Unless we suppose that self-repping spacecraft can also be made using the banging-rocks-together method.
The challenge is to cram a sophisticated (yet suitably abridged) industrial civilisation into a smallish spacecraft that can still operate after a journey of hundreds, or thousands, of years.
Maybe Bernal’s concept would work better; send biological organisms to nearby systems in vast numbers in the hope that some of them would infect the planets there.
Not if their society is better than ours at dealing with their insane individuals.
That’s not just better, that’s perfection.
Anything even halfway better than our system (where it’s the insane majority who actually run things) would seem hat way, yes.
I suppose it’s possible, but ISTM (with my human bias!) that some societies, and maybe most, will put at least some value on individual freedom to choose how to live their lives - and if so, some individuals will probably choose to explore and maybe even settle new places. And if that’s the case, then it’s inevitable that they will spread. Even if it’s just a tiny percentage, that will eventually lead to wide settlement, presuming the technical ability.
I haven’t seen a counter-argument to my thesis that no civilization could endure through the thousands of years of developing intelligence which necessarily includes thousands of years of bigotry and hatred, all of which precedes an intelligence capable of interstellar travel or communication, without destroying itself (or its home planet) along the way.
There’s the thing - you have the biases of a member of an, as I’ve said, collectively insane species.
I fail to see the inevitability. Explore further, yes, sure, but if they are mentally like I’ve suggested, there is no rationale for them settling anywhere else.
You’re presuming the supermajority is just going to allow these rugged individualists to spread like cancer. That would not be sane.
I don’t agree that bigotry and hatred is an inevitability, so I didn’t see the point of arguing against the conclusions derived from that faulty premise.
Trouble is, interstellar exploration would probably require a very large communal effort, so a few rebels wouldn’t be able to do it successfully. An interstellar spaceship would require as much energy as the entire energy budget of the Earth, according to Charlie Stross.
To put this figure in perspective, the total conversion of one kilogram of mass into energy yields 9 x 1016 Joules. (Which one of my sources informs me, is about equivalent to 21.6 megatons in thermonuclear explosive yield). So we require the equivalent energy output to 400 megatons of nuclear armageddon in order to move a capsule of about the gross weight of a fully loaded Volvo V70 automobile to Proxima Centauri in less than a human lifetime. That’s the same as the yield of the entire US Minuteman III ICBM force.
For a less explosive reference point, our entire planetary economy runs on roughly 4 terawatts of electricity (4 x 1012 watts). So it would take our total planetary electricity production for a period of half a million seconds — roughly 5 days — to supply the necessary va-va-voom.
But to bring this back to earth with a bump, let me just remind you that this probe is so implausibly efficient that it’s veering back into “magic wand” territory. I’ve tap-danced past a 100% efficient power transmission system capable of operating across interstellar distances with pinpoint precision and no conversion losses, and that allows the spacecraft on the receiving end to convert power directly into momentum. This is not exactly like any power transmission system that anyone’s built to this date, and I’m not sure I can see where it’s coming from.
Let’s postulate that in the future, it will be possible to wave a magic wand and construct a camping kit that encapsulates all the necessary technologies and information to rebuild a human civilization capable of eventually sending out interstellar colonization missions — a bunch of self-replicating, self-repairing robotic hardware, and a downloadable copy of the sum total of human knowledge to date.
Maybe it really is possible to devise stripped-down versions of an industrial civilisation, and take such a version with you everywhere you go. If you can’t distil your technological civilisation into an easy-to-carry, optimised and miniaturised version, your exploration mission would fail soon after you reach the first star on your itinerary. To thrive at your destination, repair your ship (or build another one) and set off to the next destination, you would need a comprehensive set of prospecting and manufacturing skills.
Maybe some sufficiently advanced alien civilisations can afford to gift this abundance of energy and information technology to a few rebels; but that probably requires vast and energy-rich civilisations hidden out there in deep space full of stay at-homes who can afford to indulge a small minority.
Can you give me a scenario in which a species gets to the point of technological brilliance without passing through a long period of divisions caused by tribal nationalistic religious etc beliefs? I can not,
It would be an industrial process. I don’t see how that makes it a civilization.
Also: I think we need to separate two types of statements.
The statement ‘engineering problems that now look to us to be impossible to solve may be solvable and may even be easy for some other species which has had much more time to learn about them’ is sensible; and I’ll even add that some such problems may be easily solvable for some alien species which just approaches them differently, because of the ways in which they are alien.
But the statement ‘all engineering problems are solvable, given enough time’ is a different statement entirely, and doesn’t follow from the first.
Which is what I said. Humans circa 2025 can’t do it, after all.
Also as stated.
It’s not a civilization though. That’s the thing in dispute.
It requires an advanced civilization to make a dark matter gun, but that doesn’t entail a dark matter gun must encapsulate all the technology of a civilization.
It requires an advanced civilization to make a self-replicating probe, but that doesn’t entail a self-replicating probe must encapsulate all the technology of a civilization.
It even requires an entire civilisation to make something as simple as a pencil; why do you think an interstellar self-replicating spaceship would be any different? An archaeologist, looking at a modern, mass-produced graphite pencil, could deduce the existence of an entire civilisation from it. My contention is that we would need to concentrate a significant fraction of the skills and information contained in our industrial civilisation in order to create a self-repping space probe, and once that was successful, the same complex mass of capabilities could be put to work to build an almost limited number of other facets of our civilisation as well.
Stross stated the same goal in my earlier quote;
…a camping kit that encapsulates all the necessary technologies and information to rebuild a human civilization capable of eventually sending out interstellar colonization missions — a bunch of self-replicating, self-repairing robotic hardware, and a downloadable copy of the sum total of human knowledge to date.
Reduce this ‘camping kit’ too far, and you will fail.
Or, Zero other worlds.
Assuming that intelligent life (and the resulting civilization) comes from the form of individual intelligent beings like humans, it’s a fair question, I suppose. It’s hard for us, whose intelligence and species is of that form, to picture how a truly alien intelligence might operate.
Science fiction is full of stories featuring intelligent species and civilizations in which there’s a gestalt or hive intelligence. I have no idea how feasible it would be for such intelligent species to arise in real-life, but presumably, a civilization of that sort would have far less issue with individual differences (and, probably, any individuals who deviate from the collective intelligence would be culled).
Or a humanity that’s more like bonobos than chimps. Where we resolve all tribal differences and personal conflict with sex. No hive mind, just different coping mechanisms.