How did you arrive at that conclusion? You seem to be arguing that whatever sci-fi concepts people can imagine must necessarily come to pass.
What kind of artificial evolution? Synthetic microbes? Genetic manipulation? And this will magically replace the need to survive and reproduce? I really don’t know how you’re comfortable just expecting that the science gods will provide.
That’s now with guns, isn’t it? A high-powered rifle will smash through any armor that’s feasible to wear around. As for a concealed weapon with similar killing power: a grenade.
Heck, although modern vest armor will defeat many modern handgun rounds, it won’t defeat all of them. The rounds it does defeat will still pack a good wallop and largely stop the targeted person from fighting back.
Vests are especially ineffective when handguns are used up close and personal and there’s plenty of body available not inside any part of the vest.
I too didn’t quite get the point you’re questioning.
Ultimately it’s not weapons or defenses that will make or break a civilization as weapons lethality goes up. What will make or break the civilization is whether the government (of whatever form) can ensure there are bad consequences for using your weapons illegitimately.
A society where armed citizens can randomly kill one another with impunity will soon fall apart. A society where armed citizens mostly can’t, won’t. We have examples of both extant on Earth today.
Well, yes. You’re listing off things we can do today, mere decades after discovering DNA. I would absolutely expect such technology to be utilized by an advanced ETI. Indeed, likely to an extent, and for purposes, beyond typical sci fi scenarios.
The need to survive, and importance of reproduction, are still there of course, but every piece of technology affects selective pressures.
The first time we wore an animal pelt to stay warm it reduced the selective pressure for people living in cold climates to (re-)grow their own fur. Fast forward to now, in the developing world, most of us will survive to post-reproductive age and have as many children as we choose. Regardless of how strong we are, or if we have x-men powers.
I know that some people will not like the implication that using technology is somehow “post” evolution and will still insist that what is happening is vanilla evolution, just our own path. But for the point I am making, it doesn’t matter what view a person takes on that.
If we consider evolution to include whatever humans do with technology, well, that includes genetic manipulation then. If we don’t, then “normal” evolution ended at least a million years ago when we started using fire.
Long before Voyager could get anywhere near other halfway curious and friendly intelligent life, and barring our complete self-destruction, we will be communicating with said intelligent life, at the speed of light, by radio or similar. This is so much cheaper and better than space travel. We’ll tell them this ancient Voyager thingee is coming their way, and maybe they will grab it for fun. But the information on it will add nothing because of the massive communications long underway.
If you really were to send a spacecraft to a planet outside our solar system, it would be a complete waste to send it to one with intelligent life. We already will know all about them by communications links (or know that they are hostile and should not be approached). It would only, and barely given the cost, make sense to send physical probes to places where intelligent life does not exist. That’s where there is something to explore we don’t already know everything about.
Sure. Weapons will get more powerful over time, while our ability to shield ourselves from them does not scale appropriately. And don’t forget the Kzinti lesson (fusion-driven spacecraft are fusion weapons waiting for a target); more to the point, any spacecraft is a deadly kinetic weapon, and a solar system full of spacecraft is one that is full of bombs.
As a solution to the Fermi Paradox it is not often considered - but the challenges associated with not ‘using your weapons illegitimately’ in a high-energy-use civilisation are profound. And only ‘high-energy-civilisations’ will ever get to visit another star.
The problem is, this solution requires all high-energy-use civilizations to wipe themselves out silently, at the point where they are harnessing energies sufficient to make them “noisy”.
So again, if other filters have got us down to a handful of advanced ETIs, could this be part of the solution? Sure.
But it doesn’t seem promising as the primary reason we detect nothing despite thousands, say, of ETIs.
To state it more formally, ‘high-energy civilisations are only metastable’ because of easy access to high energy projectiles.
And two high-energy civilisations separated by a gap of several light years is even more metastable. Consider; every colony in a galactic empire can only know what happened in their neighbouring planetary systems several years ago; they can never know what the others are up to ‘right now’.
Combine that with high energy projectiles, and another cohort of galactic empires will probably eliminate themselves or each other due to perfectly normal paranoia; to quote Slartibartfast, ’everyone in the universe has that’.
It is interesting to think about an alternate Earth history where somehow the tech of nuclear weapons became widespread back in the Age of Sail.
Obviously it takes nigh-magical levels of suspension of disbelief to posit that combo of simultaneous high and low tech. But if you just run with it as a “Don’t ask” given, you get a similar level of country-destroying power coupled to very slow communications as with the high energy galactic civilizations just above.
At least for human levels of ambition, perfidy, and justified suspicion in return, that sounds like a recipe for a lot of pre-emptive explosions.
Which suggests that a civ’s / species’ capacity for ambition, perfidy, & concomitant suspicion must decline as their power levels go up. If not, that’ll turn out to be the critical filter for that particular civ / species.
Whether they get off their home planet or out of their home star system before they kill themselves is doubtless a variable. But kill themselves they will. Perhaps with extensive collateral damage to other nearby civs. Perhaps with no detectible evidence left to inform other civs that those folks ever existed.
My comments were WRT us or other intelligent life forms colonizing the galaxy. A topic that’s being discussed in this thread. Beaming a radio signal into outer space doesn’t meet the criteria of colonizing.
And though radio waves, like light, travel forever unless blocked or absorbed, the Inverse-Square Law Signal strength drops them dramatically as they spreads over the surface of an ever-expanding sphere until they are eventually indistinguishable from the background radiation.
This also assumes that there is anyone else out there to communicate with. Even if there is no other life forms in the galaxy, humans will still have a desire to spread out into it physically.
But lets assume all of the above hurdles can somehow be over-come, most stars visible to the naked-eye are a few hundred to a few thousand light-years away. So let’s take a median and say we beam a signal to a star that’s 500 light years away. That’s 500 years for the signal to get there and 500 years for it to get back. That’s a thousand year conversation. Even the closest candidate like Proxima Centauri will be an almost 9 year wait for a response.
The Alpha Centauri system, as our nearest stellar neighbor, has been a primary target for various SETI projects over the years. SETI Project Phoenix, for example, scanned the closest 800 stars to Earth between 1990 and 2004, including Alpha Centauri, and found no evidence of extraterrestrial signals. The project focused on scrutinizing the vicinities of nearby, Sun-like stars within approximately 240 light-years of Earth. So, again, an almost 500 year two-way conversation IF there were signals, which there weren’t.
So any communicating with aliens will be even further away and even longer communication times. Making conversations pretty much irrelevant.
I don’t agree, but that’s for the funders of probes to decide.
