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Fermi Paradox discussion reply
My comment reply to this comment by seawasp exceeded LJ's character limit. Oops.


In 1), you have to argue that TCs do not prevent other TCs from forming (because we're here), *and* that there are no expansionist TCs, only those that value wildness more than they would value the vast majority of all the energy out there. This is only plausible if there is some major selection effect that controls for that, which we haven't hit, yet (since there are lots of people in our civilization that would prefer to colonize than watch the stars burn down).

2a) I'm not arguing that there will be any humans (physically) a million years from now, or even that there will be a hundred years from now. But I am arguing that absent a civilization-wide catastrophe (an "existential threat", as the Singularity Institute people say), those individuals who are descended from us will be at least as expansionist as we are, since only those who are expansionist will be well represented among an increasing population.

2b) We can *see* lots of big disasters (supernova, gamma ray bursters (whatever they are), etc), but that's just a compelling argument to expand as fast as possible to shorten the window in which our civilization is vulnerable to them. As far as I'm aware, there are no galaxy-wide disasters visible to us in the ~10 billion years we can survey.

2c) Molecular manufacturing isn't strictly required for any of my argument -- it could all be just bulk-process methods such as we now use -- but it's a convenient marker for the limits of easily foreseeable manufacturing technology. Characterizing nanotechnology as "superstuff" suggests to me that you haven't looked into the details of its limitations and strengths.

3) If we are not willing to use X% of the energy available, then it will be impossible to prevent use of X% or higher by other civilizations, since they'd have more energy at their disposal than we. This argument seems to carry through all the way to the physical limits of efficiency.

4) Well, the Earth is ~5 billion years old, and life is at least ~3 billion years old on Earth. If any species had gotten started on the urbanization of the galaxy in the last 200,000 years, we'd know (or not exist, but leaving that aside). So for this argument to hold, there has to be something that prevented the development of human-level intelligence and technological civilizations until the last 200,000 years. Of course, it's possible to argue that it's extremely unlikely that human-level intelligence will develop a technological civilization in the first place, and I think that may have some merit, since physiologically modern humans appear to have been around for tens of thousands of years with essentially no progress toward our level of technology until five thousand years ago or so.

But if that's the case, we're likely to find lots of non-technological species which are nevertheless somewhere around human intelligence. That would be an interesting result.

6) With genetic engineering, more targetted drugs, and surgical modifications to the human organism, I don't think that human behavorial characteristics will remain as static as they are now for long.

Individuals have more freedom to act as they choose now than ever before, and when someone can leave the solar vicinity entirely, it would require an incredibly draconian tyranny to keep any individual from doing so. Such a tyranny may be possible, but I would lump it with other existential threats and disasters.

We do less expanding now because there's no easy place to expand *to*, with technology as it is. We're cooped up on this planet, and limited to the expansion that can be done without overrunning our biosphere. Replicating machines will not have these limitations, since there's no ecosystem to damage where the raw materials and energy is.

Reproductive rates are dropping because the cost of having children is so high. If the marginal cost of another child (or just another copy!) gets low enough, population growth rates will surge again. This especially applies to people in machina, who will probably have a far, far higher reproduction rate than people in meat do.

You write, "A thousand years from now, when any individual can have as much entertainment, food, etc., as they can handle, and choose to reproduce, or not, and possibly live as long as they choose... we will have even less reason to do that." But since some people will copy themselves and having offspring as fast as practical at any rate, all you are suggesting is that the vast majority of the future population will be descended from such people.

7) It only really requires you to believe that replicators are possible to build, but since we *are* replicators, that doesn't seem like such a stretch. :) Like I say, however, the most basic form of this argument only says that absent some disaster that destroys a civilization, natural selection on those that choose to expand will eventually select those who expand the most and fastest as the bulk of said civilization, however they do it.

8) It seems to me that the dropping "seed biologicals scenario" is just like the simulation argument, except slower and requiring far more resources. But it doesn't mean anything to my argument, since unless you're postulating a solar-system-enclosing video display (something that seems unlikely to work, to me), we'd still see the signs of their handiwork in the cosmos elsewhere as vast sections that were infrared only. This applies to the other "natural park" scenarios, too.