Science buff- Like Barack Obama? Better not like manned spaceflight then

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Heraclitus
The myriad of civs provide pockets of stable resistance to the expansionist civ, these stable pockets are bigger or smaller according to how large the civ was. (did you look at the link?)

I looked at the percolation theory link what of it? Are you suggesting that earth is in a pocket resulting from percolation effects of a large population of civs on colonization that is not overlapping the artifacts of any civs? If so that explanation would only make sense for a single generation of civs which somehow maintain a stable relationship with each other. The odds of always being in a region of non civ exploitation would seem very small. Furthermore with the galaxy having variable geography due to orbital variations over time each solar system should find itself within at least one exploitive ET civilizations zone of influence over the billions of years they revolve around the galactic core which further complicates the idea of stable non exploited regions due to percolation effects. In any case it's not necessary that the expansionist civ conquer everything and leave no pockets of resistance. Only that they or another civ reach us and other defenseless exploitable resources in the galaxy.

Originally posted by Heraclitus
The other realms of expansion are the ones that you mentioned the Hive civ might find, I said maybe their civ, the not so expansionist civ found them and got all the resources it needed to make sure their long term self-preservation measures in this galaxy remained in effect.

When I suggested the possibility of access to resources external to the observable universe it was to explain why expansion might not occur in the visible universe even if an expansionist civ arose but your enforcing civ reinforced by resources outside the observable universe doesn't seem to solve anything new since the the other civs would enjoy the same advantage if such resources were available. I'm not sure why you're invoking this when we both agree that access to such resources may be a resolution to the Fermi paradox.

Originally posted by Heraclitus
You said a self-destructing civ leaving no evidence behind. Who said that they wouldn't?

sounds like a mis communication then. We agree that a self destructed civ can leave evidence.

Originally posted by Heraclitus
Plus you said equally many expansionist civs, what about the isolationist non-expanding cics? If anything I would imagine that it is more likely for a civ that has survived several centuries stuck on its home world to be much more focused on vertical growth. Thus there would be a majority of non-expanding civs many of them interested in other systems and could recognize virulent civs perhaps with the aid of other non-expansionist civs.

first of all without FTL coordination that sort of vast interstellar trans-species alliance seems all but impossible. Certainly a scenario of many like minded isolationist civilizations already occupying so much of the galaxy that no single civilization could displace them all is possible but it doesn't in any way prevent the expansionist from expanding into the defenseless unoccupied areas like our solar system. If the isolationists don't see fit to exterminate each other why stop the expansionists from taking the uninhabited bits that are left over? It's not like the expansionists have to be an overt viral threat. They could well shy away from colonizing any civilized area. That wouldn't stop them from colonizing the prehistoric solar system. This whole explanation really requires that there be advanced civilizations almost everywhere that are overwhelmingly isolationist and that all identify non isolationist civs as threats that must be pre-emptively destroyed while managing to not destroy or mistrust each other (which would open room for a later expansionist civ) and while not regarding humanity as a potential threat to be likewise dealt with. I'd call such a remarkable situation a tremendous fluke.

Originally posted by Heraclitus
I don't see why you find FLT changes the dynamics that much. Maybe its important to us who only live for a century max a very old civ would see a hundred thousand years as we see a decade.

FTL makes all the difference in the world! without it the patient enforcing civ arrives, sure, but their target has had plenty of time to close the technological gap and even render the incoming fleet obsolete. Even worse they will essentially need to leave occupation garrisons everywhere they've 'cleansed' to prevent colony ships sneaking through the vastness of space to re-occupy the places they've sterilized. I don't understand why you can't see the profound difference FTL would make in enforcing any sort of rules on the galactic population.

Originally posted by Heraclitus
Plus you are forgetting the cost of expansion, you are assuming it is cheap (for a system wide civ), I assume it is at least sufficiently expensive so that it is not necessarily the best investment.

If you're an expansionist civ it's your best investment by definition. Of course it would be cheap for them since the colonies are built from resources in situ and all they really need to send is a mote of starting capital and information. How would it not be cheap in comparison to the resources obtained on arrival? The only way out is the access to resources outside of the visible universe that I speculated about previously.

[Heraclitus]

Originally posted by Geronimo


FTL makes all the difference in the world! without it the patient enforcing civ arrives, sure, but their target has had plenty of time to close the technological gap and even render the incoming fleet obsolete. Even worse they will essentially need to leave occupation garrisons everywhere they've 'cleansed' to prevent colony ships sneaking through the vastness of space to re-occupy the places they've sterilized. I don't understand why you can't see the profound difference FTL would make in enforcing any sort of rules on the galactic population.

Believe me I can understand the profound difference fast & energy efficient FLT travel would make. It appears you misunderstand me. Where is it written that FLT if it could be achieved would provide "fast" travel? We have a few theories and speculations, but we can not know how FLT could be achieved, if it can be achieved at all.

What if FLT for some reason can only achieve 2c or 3c? And who says that it will not consume incredibly vast amounts of energy? And further more what if the energy cost rises exponentially?
Such vast amounts of energy that it would be better to send a fleet of obsolete ships at lets say 2c and instead of a single advanced ship at 10c. Now the words "advanced" and "obsolete" are used in the previous sentence, to describe how the ships would compare to enemy forces once they reach them.

You also have a silent assumption that of sustained rapid technological progress. For the vast majority of human history technological progress has been so slow to be immeasurable. Perhaps after transition to a type I civilization a similar period of slow progress takes place. Either because there is no need for it or because the engendering and science behind it become exponentially more difficult to understand. Our current rate of progress seems exponential, but we have no conclusive proof that it is, that it perhaps it isn’t just a steep temporary increase in the rate of progress caused by societal factors and the adoption of the scientific method.

PS This is a very fun argument we have going here. I'll respond to your other points soon.

[Heraclitus]

Originally posted by Geronimo

I looked at the percolation theory link what of it? Are you suggesting that earth is in a pocket resulting from percolation effects of a large population of civs on colonization that is not overlapping the artifacts of any civs? If so that explanation would only make sense for a single generation of civs which somehow maintain a stable relationship with each other. The odds of always being in a region of non civ exploitation would seem very small. Furthermore with the galaxy having variable geography due to orbital variations over time each solar system should find itself within at least one exploitive ET civilizations zone of influence over the billions of years they revolve around the galactic core which further complicates the idea of stable non exploited regions due to percolation effects. In any case it's not necessary that the expansionist civ conquer everything and leave no pockets of resistance. Only that they or another civ reach us and other defenseless exploitable resources in the galaxy.

There are several situation where this theory is valid:

First off we have no idea as to the longevity of civilization, it is perfectly possible that the first generation of civs have reached a stable state and have maintained it for the past several hundred million years.

This assumes that we are in fact not the first generation of civs, I admit it is very unlikely but since we have no idea as to what laws if any determine the development of civilization we can not discount the possibility.
We have very little understanding as to how long transition to mulit-cellular life usually (takes on worlds that can provide environmental niches, worlds that don’t will naturally never evolve multi-cellular life). On worlds that can support such life it will eventually evolve if simply given enough time. We have no idea if it is not so rare or if it is extremely rare for a planet to have such conditions.
Well, that was a long, but still inadequate paragraph explaining why we cant discount a seemingly silly possibility because we don’t know enough.

It could be possible that these exploiting zones are very small encompassing only handfuls of systems.


I said and you agreed that advanced civs most likely leave artifacts behind, but what if they don’t or perhaps these remaining artifacts are very rare?
I think all traces of human existence except nuclear waste could disappear in about 50 million years, the obvious ones in about one million years, if we went poof right now and all our stuff stayed behind.
What if our planet was in the exploiting zone of one or several civs? I could easily imagine a history were the Earth is terraformed and all the native primitive single cell life dies out, since it encounters rival that are much more advanced. The colony fails, we have just fossils left without any DNA.
Come to think of it do we have proof that the diversification of life that occurred with multi-celled organisms was native? Or perhaps the Earth is mined silly for resources we don’t miss cause we never knew them. Or perhaps the other planets in our solar system were more interesting and the aliens exploited them first?
Technology? It could be anywhere in our solar system, heck it could be here. What if some substances found in the Earth crust aren’t naturally occurring in the quantities we observe? What if the advanced technology was fragile and prone to decay, perhaps by design so that it was easily recyclable? Maybe ther are a few such relics but they are misidentified or even purposley hidden from the general pubilc.
There is nothing to indicate that aliens didn’t find local life and said “ok we’ll strip mine some other planet first let's study or play around (genetically modify) with the native life for a while". Then they dropped dead for reasons we can’t understand or maybe they didn't. But that's the zoo hypothesis and we have already talked about that.

Plus if another civ appeard and found artifacts of a long lost civilsation, wouldn't they before converting the system into mass try to do some archeology or first recycling the stuff, destroying some evidence of the first civ as well as proloning the time they didn't create wast quantites of such material evidence? Who knows maybe the stuff they could found could cause asimilar collaps within their own society? But that's SF. It can be frustrating not knowing where the realm of possibity ends and where fantasy begins. Anyhow the idea that each generation of civ deveops a bit faster before it dies/leaves? isn't that far feched for several reasons.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Heraclitus


There are several situation where this theory is valid:

First off we have no idea as to the longevity of civilization, it is perfectly possible that the first generation of civs have reached a stable state and have maintained it for the past several hundred million years.

This assumes that we are in fact not the first generation of civs, I admit it is very unlikely but since we have no idea as to what laws if any determine the development of civilization we can not discount the possibility.
We have very little understanding as to how long transition to mulit-cellular life usually (takes on worlds that can provide environmental niches, worlds that don’t will naturally never evolve multi-cellular life). On worlds that can support such life it will eventually evolve if simply given enough time. We have no idea if it is not so rare or if it is extremely rare for a planet to have such conditions.
Well, that was a long, but still inadequate paragraph explaining why we cant discount a seemingly silly possibility because we don’t know enough.

It could be possible that these exploiting zones are very small encompassing only handfuls of systems.


I said and you agreed that advanced civs most likely leave artifacts behind, but what if they don’t or perhaps these remaining artifacts are very rare?
I think all traces of human existence except nuclear waste could disappear in about 50 million years, the obvious ones in about one million years, if we went poof right now and all our stuff stayed behind.
What if our planet was in the exploiting zone of one or several civs? I could easily imagine a history were the Earth is terraformed and all the native primitive single cell life dies out, since it encounters rival that are much more advanced. The colony fails, we have just fossils left without any DNA.
Come to think of it do we have proof that the diversification of life that occurred with multi-celled organisms was native? Or perhaps the Earth is mined silly for resources we don’t miss cause we never knew them. Or perhaps the other planets in our solar system were more interesting and the aliens exploited them first?
Technology? It could be anywhere in our solar system, heck it could be here. What if some substances found in the Earth crust aren’t naturally occurring in the quantities we observe? What if the advanced technology was fragile and prone to decay, perhaps by design so that it was easily recyclable? Maybe ther are a few such relics but they are misidentified or even purposley hidden from the general pubilc.
There is nothing to indicate that aliens didn’t find local life and said “ok we’ll strip mine some other planet first let's study or play around (genetically modify) with the native life for a while". Then they dropped dead for reasons we can’t understand or maybe they didn't. But that's the zoo hypothesis and we have already talked about that.

Plus if another civ appeard and found artifacts of a long lost civilsation, wouldn't they before converting the system into mass try to do some archeology or first recycling the stuff, destroying some evidence of the first civ as well as proloning the time they didn't create wast quantites of such material evidence? Who knows maybe the stuff they could found could cause asimilar collaps within their own society? But that's SF. It can be frustrating not knowing where the realm of possibity ends and where fantasy begins. Anyhow the idea that each generation of civ deveops a bit faster before it dies/leaves? isn't that far feched for several reasons.

Longevity considerations don't help make a percolation explanation of the apparent lack of exploitation of local resources more plausible unless we posit that the majority of all civs last almost as long as all of the time since the first civilizations appeared. It also doesn't explain how a percolation colonization pattern that left our solar system unexploited would persist even when the geography of the galaxy changes over time.

I have already suggested that we may represent the first generation of civs in the galaxy and I agree that if this is the case it strongly suggests that the bottleneck to civilization is very narrow indeed.

Small zones of exploitation are indeed possible and may even be the most usual behavior but again it only takes one very dedicated expansion prone species to ensure that all exploitable resources are claimed and used throughout the galaxy.

Similarly there may be species that leave a nearly invisible footprint but they do not trouble our speculations. Rather we need to instead consider the very thorough species who try to extract as much use as possible out of all materials available. There is plenty of usable material left here and the question is why hasn't anybody in the history of the galaxy used the unused stuff yet? Invisible usage of other stuff that's already gone wouldn't explain anything.

Humanity has indeed had a rather low impact on the solar system but we are an exceedingly young and weak civilization. Nonetheless I find your suggestion that there would be no trace of humanity 50 million years from now if we all died off totally implausible. It's totally tangential to the discussion but I can't help but point out that most artifacts would actually outlast the radioactive waste since it doesn't spontaneously self degrade like radioactive isotopes do. We humans love to bury things and we like to produce non biodegradable stuff. I think there would be even more relics of the the last few decades of human civilization than there are dinosaur fossils from their millions of years of ruling the earth.

The SF angle shouldn't give us too much trouble. It makes it very difficult to make predictions for a single species but for generalizing on what is possible for the whole galaxy we have more room for guesses. We don't for instance have to worry about what sort of evidence civlizations might leave. We just have to worry about whether at least some civilizations would be expected to leave obvious evidence and we already know enough to expect that some should.

[Addled Platypus]

who needs maned space flight

just get abducted

[Heraclitus]

Geronimo, if most of our plastics aren't biodegradable now, that doesn’t mean that bacteria won't evolve which can eat the stuff. Likewise highly radioactive waste will be clearly artificial for a very very long time. I seem to recall reading an article a few months ago, which supports my case. When I’ll get around to digging it up, I'll post the link here.


You don't seem to have respond to my post concerning the speed vs. cost aspect of interstellar travel, I'd be interested to hear about your take on the subject.

[The Mad Monk]

Originally posted by Heraclitus
I would find a universe filled with little drug addict civs very deppresing, it would be better to postualte that we are alone in our galaxy or that we are the first to evolve.

Once you realize that the entire universe is a closed system undergoing a slow heat death, and that nothing will remain after it is done, thereby rendering anything you do moot, a lifetime spent in VR dosen't seem that bad at all.

[Blake]

What about a Transcedence victory?

Take me seriously for a moment here.
Philosophies like VHEMT and religions like Buddhism, support human cessation - it basically goes, you're happier if you are not controlled by the reproductive drive and there's no moral imperative to create more humans - the happiness of those which are actually ALIVE is the only important thing (the happiness of non-existent humans rightfully doesn't matter).

So the transcendence victory, essentially involves the entire species, collectively deciding they are better off without physical bodies - what happens next is speculation, maybe they simply cease to exist, or maybe they become beings of pure energy, but the point is that physically the population ceases to exist - it's no longer tied to the physical world in any way.


Now it's worth noting that neither VHEMT nor Buddhism will result in this outcome (even if it is the logical conclusion). It would require another more powerful movement, or a stronger imperative for people to overcome their reproductive drive. For example, knowledge that entropy gets the last laugh. Does a civilization WANT to hang around to that bleak end?

For example, say that humans develop AI's and robots to support their physical needs. Soon the AI's merge into a single collective consciousness and it provides every single need for the humans. The consciousness quickly attains full enlightenment, and noting that the humans aren't happy now that they can't be driven by their primal instincts and urges, it starts teaching every human enlightenment, so they can be happy.

And after a while, this works. Every human becomes enlightened and after a while, there are no more humans. The consciousness itself then transcends physical existence (it's generally accepted the fully enlightened ones only hang around until everyone else is enlightened) and the civilization has ceased.
Transcendence victory has been completed.

Now because this has been a completely peaceful movement, anyone who doesn't want to leave, doesn't have to. We assume that every being capable of being enlightened, does get enlightened. But that still leaves the animal kingdom. So nature is left behind.

So what to do with the remaining industrial and technological infrastructure, no longer needed? The nicest thing to do - nicest for nature, would be to leave the planet as they found it. So that would involve having that infrastructure unbuild itself. For example, use a nanorobot swarm - I'll call it gaia-goo, to completely disassemble civilization. The gaia-goo would be controlled by the consciousness so it could also reshape the surface of the planet, repair the scars left by cities and highways and stuff. It could even plant "fake evidence" in the geographical record, as if the civilization had never existed.

So civilization arises, it then ceases and the planet returns completely to nature as if the civilization had never existed.

At which point, a NEW race of human-caliber sentients are free to evolve and restart civilization and the entire process, forever oblivious to the fact that it had already happened.

The transcendence victory basically assumes that physical bodies is just a phase that sentients grow out of after attaining human level of cognitive ability. It would explain the lack of any galaxy-spanning civilizations, especially if it's inevitable that any sufficiently advanced AI will become fully enlightened (which would be pure conjecture).

[Heraclitus]

Wouldn't it be more enlightened of them to terrafrom a few extra lifeless planets before they left, by that logic?

BTW The transcendence victory in SMAC was more akin to achieving godhood about equivalent to a technological singularity.

But I don't know where do the conciseness go? Do they leave the universe or does consciousness simply take another medium (body)?

If they just commit clean suicide I can’t see how that would be better than final entropy? But I suppose that final enlightenment must be a terrifying experience, nothing new to learn to see to experience, ever. But It can’t even be terrifying, cause your too enlightened to be subject to such feelings. Are there feelings at all, are there ideas thoughts? Do you even experience the universe?

[Blake]

Enlightenment is essentially the understanding:

"I am happy when I want for nothing"

[Blake]

It's the lack of clinging, the lack of a need to do things to justify your existence, to give your life purpose, to collect things to define yourself.

A fully enlightened consciousness, could easily see that furthering the paradigm of "finding happiness through having more" would lead to an exhaustion of all resources (because people will just want more and more and more and more and more when things have essentially no cost), and so it makes more sense to teach people how to be happier with having less. For one, it's a lot less work for the benevolent consciousness...

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by Addled Platypus
who needs maned space flight

just get abducted

Elvis tried that, and where is he now?

[Heraclitus]

On the Moon playing golf with JFK.

[Geronimo]

Blake unless your pure energy-non physical bodies involve technologies that access hypothetical resources outside the physical universe then it won't be possible to disconnect them from the need for resources from the universe to maintain their disembodied existence. Unless this disembodied existence is just a euphemism for "dead", in which case you're basically suggesting that all civilizations determine the only way to meet their goals is to kill themselves.

Anyway as an explanation for why there would never have been any expansionist civs among all of the species that have arose in our galaxy I don't see how it's much different from the drug addict/VR civ theories. As you say it's conjecture but if we ever find that relatively generic AI's can somehow independently discover the principles of Buddhist transcendence then I guess that discovery might move this idea up in the pack of explanations some. Personally I'm a bit skeptical that all species will follow paths that cause them to tamper with their motivations to meet the environment rather than continuing to tamper with the environment to match their motivations. Especially in non monolithic civs. Reason being that in civs where the choice to do this would be an individual choice those doing so would become obvious helpless victims to the non enlightened members of their species. You would simply end up with the species fate being increasingly determined by the less and less enlightened members.

The other problem is that in terms of galactic competition enlightened civs would be at an absolute disadvantage in comparison to unenlightened civs. So if at least one civ arises that simply cannot achieve or appreciate enlightenment then we expect the whole galaxy is it's oyster and it consumes all even faster than we'd expect in a galaxy in which nobody achieves this sort of enlightened end.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Blake
It's the lack of clinging, the lack of a need to do things to justify your existence, to give your life purpose, to collect things to define yourself.

A fully enlightened consciousness, could easily see that furthering the paradigm of "finding happiness through having more" would lead to an exhaustion of all resources (because people will just want more and more and more and more and more when things have essentially no cost), and so it makes more sense to teach people how to be happier with having less. For one, it's a lot less work for the benevolent consciousness...

All these things might more readily be achieved in advanced civs by directly tampering with their alien brains. Make it so that laziness is the only instinct and bump up the reward for doing nothing a zillion fold. voila very happy alien who does absolutely nothing.