That’s effectively the same thing, and I haven’t seen any metrics on this determination of likelihood you’re doing.
Why is it likely? What’s the necessary connection between AI and travel? Or genetic engineering and travel? I’m not seeing it.
Are you the OP? Because the OP wrote
and that was what I was referring to.
And no, if one alien managed to produce viable tech for FTL by yourself (thousands of generations, remember?) that does not make them a society. It might not need a chain of invention that includes AI - the real world is not always a Civilization discovery tree, serendipitous discoveries happen. Read “The Road Not Taken” by Turtledove for what happens when an alien species assumes that the path of technology is fixed. For all we know, FTL may require some way of thinking about physics we’re just not trying yet. I doubt it, myself, but there you go - I’m human, after all.
If you’re not seeing the connection that’s because there is none, and no-one has suggested there is.
What I am saying is this: interstellar travel looks to be a much more difficult problem than developing AI, say. Certainly it looks likely that humans will develop general AI before we can send a contingent to a planet orbiting another star, let alone invade.
Similarly with neural implants, GE, nanotech, and so on.
Now very obviously their history is not going to parallel ours. All I am saying, is that given that a random interstellar species will be much, much more advanced than us, not just a little bit, I think it’s a good bet that they will have a good mastery of at least one of these technologies.
It stretches credulity IMO to imagine a species millions of years more advanced than us having black spots over much of what present day humans are already gaining an understanding of.
I didn’t say they would be a society, I said “equivalent to”.
Modern-day science requires many parallel strands of science, engineering and mathematics pushing forwards. Many of these strands don’t have a specific goal; they are not applied sciences, but they then prove to be absolutely essential in understanding a phenomenon or developing new tech.
Now, you could say interstellar travel could be different to this, and a single discovery or a single branch of science is basically all that’s needed. It doesn’t look like a good bet for that though. There are many separate problems involved in safely transporting an organism several light years to another planet and then landing successfully. Even detecting the planet in the first place has required some pretty impressive maths and physics insights, and of course engineering.
So, this hypothetical super-clever entity has sufficient memory to be pushing many separate strands of science and mathematics together and can crosslink insights from these fields appropriately. His brain is essentially playing the role of many humans cooperating.
Even if you disagree with that way of phrasing it, the fact is if he’s performing non-goal oriented science and maths, and pushing those fields much further than humans have to date, there’s a good chance he’ll advance one or more of the fields we’ve listed.
Two problems … your “likely” and “less likely” are different from mine. I believe you are operating under the delusion that aliens will have the same social evolutionary goals and engage in the same thought processes as yourself
Second, your “candy floss” example is predictably ridiculous, since the scenarios I’ve suggested, such as aliens embracing instinct or eschewing passive social standards, are in no way as blatantly and passively-aggressively insulting or condescending as your floss comment. It’s non sequitur that my warlike or “politically incorrect” aliens equate candy spaceships. The suggestion is beneath you, as you know, and the implications are quite frankly rude.
Nope, I have been clear that that is not the case. If you think I’ve assumed aliens will have the same social evolutionary goals and engage in the same thought processes, quote it.
The example however refutes your point that “any sci-fi type scenario is as good as another” implying all bets are off. It’s not “beneath me”, it’s a reductio ad absurdum.
What possible reason would an alien race have to expend resources to come this far to begin with? Unless they discovered a limitless source of free energy, I don’t see it.
I’ve had veiled insults thrown at me several times in this thread, including twice now in this post of yours.
Meanwhile I have not insulted you or anyone else.
Saying, as I did, “If we can’t say X is unlikely, we can’t say Y is unlikely either” is, at the worst, a straw man / hyperbole (I don’t believe it’s that, because the argument works, but that’s all it could be).
Even that might be somewhat debatable. The medical care that is implemented by much of Terran humanity is clearly opposed to natural selection, meaning that homo sapiens sapiens has chosen to subvert evolution for emotional reasons. Injuries, yes, that may be a slightly different matter, especially if a pro-social species engaged in interstellar travel have a limited cohort to staff the vessel(s), but to infer that blind adherence to hippocratic principles would always logically follow is highly questionable. Remember, we are talking about alien species, their ideals and thought patterns would almost certainly differ from ours, and as we have not yet accomplished long distance space travel, we have little idea what non-technical aspects would be involved in surviving and mastering it.
Why do people assume alien will be so intelligent, enlightened and sophisticated and won’t be a bunch of dumbasses like most humans? I mean we have some pretty smart people who design and build airplanes. But it’s not like you have to be an aerospace engineer to ride in one.
“Welcome to Earth! We have so much to learn from each other!”
“Whatever delbra*pt. I just fix the anal probes. You probably want to speak to my Overzorb…Morp.”
Again, the pedantic reason to me is that that behavior would had been common between the aliens too, and it’s more likely to me that they would had destroyed themselves before reaching for the stars.
***We ***may not make it BTW, but if anyone is reading this in the year 3000, congratulations! And good luck out there.
There’s a problem I see with the ‘different levels of advancement’ assumption, also. If the timeframes are large enough (and it sounds like they’re being assumed to be) then it seems plausible that there are two general levels of advancement by FTL-capable alien species: either not as advanced as possible, or as advanced as possible.
There’s no reason to assume technological advancement is infinite, after all; as far as we currently are aware, there are fundamental physical limits that prevent any further advancement once those limits are reached. Therefore it seems entirely probable to me that there is a ‘final level of advancement’ that can theoretically be reached, and at that point…there is no more technology to discover, improve, or refine.
A civilization that has reached this level therefore has two other types of civilizations it can encounter: equals, and lessers. It would therefore be reasonable to exterminate all lessers, in order to prevent them from ever becoming equals. All civilizations at this point of advancement would have basically the same motivation for exterminating all lessers, so I see no reason why one civilization at that level would intervene to protect a lesser. Interaction among the equals may well be peaceful and social, or it may be a status of cold war, maintained by MAD, or any number of other possible political arrangements. But in no case is there any particular benefit to any of those endgame civilizations in allowing other civilizations to achieve the same status.
Medical care long pre-dates any knowledge of evolution, and even afterward, it’s debatable whether it’s a subversion. And it doesn’t follow that it’s for emotional reasons. If I repair my microwave, am I being emotional?
We chose to try to minimize pain, aid healing and prolong life, for initially just ourselves and our tribe. I would expect most if not all sentient species to act similarly; use their intelligence to give themselves an advantage in their environment.
Good point.
One thing I would say for such a scenario (without trying to sound like I am “answering” it), is that we would have even more reason to suppose they will explore neural and genetic augmentation, AI, VR etc.
Because they will rapidly reach the limits of progress in the external world, and any improvement to their lives from then on can only be from looking at the internal world. Not to mention they’ll have little else to apply their intellects to.
And this is a good argument.
I still think by the interstellar stage species will have largely modified themselves, but I think the game theory of this is fun, so I’ll put that to one side.
One argument against destroying lessers is that it draws the attention of the other equals.
It’s pretty risky being the first Equal species to decide to destroy Lessers, as you’re now not just an Equal, you’re an aggressive Equal. The other 4 may decide that they need to band together and wipe you out before you can threaten them.
Of course the Equals could collectively decide to destroy Lessers, but if all of them really are only motivated by self-interest at the species level (and note few if any species we know of are like this: humans, for example, are instinctively self-interested at the tribal level), it doesn’t look like a very stable situation.
One interesting idea is that of the post-intelligent future; an idea explored by Karl Schroeder and Milan Ćirković, and to some extent in the movie Wall-E as well. The human race might create competent and self-maintaining but never-the-less non-sentient robot spacecraft to ferry themselves around the universe, then gradually lose their own innate intelligence until they are little more than animals or passive spectators.
We might encounter a race of imbeciles dependent on their spacecraft to survive, with no real interest in the external universe except as a lot of pretty lights.
Except, the doughy humans in wall-e were not explorers, or the descendants of explorers, they never left the system, they were specifically hanging around waiting for Earth to become habitable again. Given the enormous effort and difficulties just getting past a heliosheath, much less to other systems, it seems highly unlikely that the kind of decline you describe would happen. Not impossible, obviously, but not very likely, especially assuming FTL.
Au contraire, you have very much suggested there is a connection, by emphasising the likelihood of an ordered sequence of mastery, with FTL late in the chain.
Why? We could send crude interstellar ships on very short notice right now, if we were willing to lob nukes a-la Orion and didn’t really care about the human cost. We’re nowhere near true AI.
Why is this a given? There’s no logical reason given by you as to why interstellar travel has to be so final in a chain of invention. Yes, yes, “shoulders of giants”, pyramid of invention, that’s all fine - but that’s only human history.
Why not? We have technological black spots throughout our history, where culture, geography or just chance have conspired against invention.
Who would imagine two continents-worth of sophisticated city builders never coming up with wheeled vehicles, for example? But that was a thing that happened.
Pedantics. Same difference - they would not be - I’m not postulating some creature with internal debates or a hive-mind here, just long-lived and hyper-intelligent.
Hyper-intelligent and with all the time in the world…
Simple question - will they be the same problems for all organisms, or are some of our concerns trivial for creatures with vastly different possible physiologies? Say, completely different timescales of living, or dormancy periods requiring no sustenance, or uber-radiation resistance. And that’s all completely overlooking the idea that it might be something we just haven’t even conceived of yet, that is trivially simple to implement - again, see “The Road Not taken”
There are several solutions to finding planets that don’t involve anything too complex, once you’re already in space - the shotgun approach, for instance. Throw small probes at every interesting star - billions and billions of probes. Hell, make them Von Neumann probes for maximum effect. We could do that with tech we have today, if we already had a sizeable foothold in space.
No, just one very clever human - would you call every idiot savant their own society? Lots of human geniuses do the same thing, making connections. That’s nothing special.
I’m not saying he’s doing that - I’m suggesting a singular research focus that just happens to travel up a path we don’t even know exists, and the result, for him, is FTL travel. That’s all he does, that’s all he gets out of it. He discovers a method to make his own private space vehicle travel interstellar distances without any concern about the trip. Maybe it’s a spacefold drive, maybe it’s a wormgate, maybe he tames a Space Whale, it doesn’t matter. What I’m saying is, that’s no less likely than your necessary pyramid of invention, until you come up with some reasoning other than combinations of “It’s a given” and “That’s how it’s worked for humans (except when it hasn’t)”
This is a good point … consider the Captain of the Exxon Valdez. There have been several ship and boat mishaps lately due to dim-witted or drunk Captains/ pilots. And the airliner that skidded on the runway sideways … was that a Korean plane? If the aliens that build big shiny ships to send into space hire similar crews, we may not be dealing with their best and brightest.
Also consider that an advanced and progressive alien race may use sub-contractors from a less evolved species to do the hard or dangerous work, like in Fifth Element (the Mangalores). The home planet may be ruled by urbane, logical cloud-city dwellers, but they may hire violent and relatively primitive races to go into the void and deal with insignificant planets like ours.
Saying that I think interstellar travel appears to be a more difficult problem than general AI is not to suggest any connection whatsoever. Try again. Or actually…don’t.
You have not parsed my point correctly. I am not saying that interstellar travel is necessarily at the end of a chain of invention.
Here is my point, again (and please this time, respond to the point. Don’t chop out individual sentences and ignore the actual argument):
The universe is thought to be approximately 14 billion years old. Life has been on earth for about 3.5 billion years, with multicellular life only appearing in the last billion.
Given this information, and the fact that there is no reason why evolution on two planets should be synchronized, the chance of any two random sentient species having evolved at exactly the same time (to within mere thousands of years) is extremely remote.
The overwhelming probability is that one species will have had millions of years more time.
Of course, one race may also advance more quickly than the other, so the time difference won’t tell the whole story. But nevertheless, on average, we’d expect one species to be far more advanced than the other.
Agreed?
So, now, we put our hand into the bag of sentient species, and pull two out.
And we see one is Homo sapiens…a species which is not interstellar, and which currently considers interstellar travel to be a very difficult problem to solve.
The other, all we know about them for sure is that they are an interstellar species.
We don’t know which species is more advanced. But if I had to guess I’d say the interstellar species; because all I know about them is that they’ve achieved something we have not.
And, is the difference in technology likely to be small or big between the two species? The difference is likely to be big, for the reasons outlined above.
If the time frames are large enough its is possible that no two FTL capable species exist in close proximity at the same time. Someone cracking the code to FTL flight does not mean that society will have the resources to engage in FTL flight. It certainly doesn’t mean that societies will remain stable long enough to develop much of an interstellar footprint.
If it last long enough to run into anyone else.
Why expend the energy and resources when other civilizations are likely to just self destruct. If sending troops to Iraq is economically draining, how draining would it be to send stuff to Alpha Centauri?
There was a sci-fi fantasy series based on the notion that humans developed a supercomputer that was charged with preserving human life and the computer decided that the best way to preserve human life was to knock everyone back to the middle ages to keep people from killing each other en masse. The computer stifled any technology that would lift humans out of middle age squalor.
The problem with interstellar travel (and space travel generally) is that it is hard to justify the expense.