Imagine if we had made a replicator, demonstrated that it could make copies of itself, established with as high confidence as we could that it could survive the trip to another star, and had let >100,000 of the things off heading to all sorts of stars in the neighborhood. They would eventually (very soon compared to a billion years) visit every star in the galaxy and that would tell us a lot about the Fermi paradox and great filter.
As I said before (discounting planetarium hypothesis) we could have a high degree of confidence that the great filter was then behind us. It couldn’t really be the case that thousands of civilizations in our galaxy had done such a thing, then changed their mind and destroyed all the replicators as some civilizations would probably destroy themselves between letting the replicators loose and changing their mind, or not change their mind/not care about the replicators. Therefore we would see evidence of their replicators in our solar system which we don’t see.
The other way we can be sure the filter is behind us is successfully navigate the Singularity (keeping roughly the same values). That seems obviously MUCH more difficult to have confidence in.
If our goal is to make sure the filter is behind us then it is best to do it with a plan we can understand and quantify. Holding off human level AI until the replicators have been let loose seems to be the highest probability way to do that, but no-one has said such a thing before now as far as I am aware.
Imagine if we had made a replicator, demonstrated that it could make copies of itself, established with as high confidence as we could that it could survive the trip to another star, and had let >100,000 of the things off heading to all sorts of stars in the neighborhood. They would eventually (very soon compared to a billion years) visit every star in the galaxy and that would tell us a lot about the Fermi paradox and great filter.
As I said before (discounting planetarium hypothesis) we could have a high degree of confidence that the great filter was then behind us. It couldn’t really be the case that thousands of civilizations in our galaxy had done such a thing, then changed their mind and destroyed all the replicators as some civilizations would probably destroy themselves between letting the replicators loose and changing their mind, or not change their mind/not care about the replicators. Therefore we would see evidence of their replicators in our solar system which we don’t see.
The other way we can be sure the filter is behind us is successfully navigate the Singularity (keeping roughly the same values). That seems obviously MUCH more difficult to have confidence in.
If our goal is to make sure the filter is behind us then it is best to do it with a plan we can understand and quantify. Holding off human level AI until the replicators have been let loose seems to be the highest probability way to do that, but no-one has said such a thing before now as far as I am aware.
I still see no answer to my question. Where is the outisize value to our species?
Not to mention that “very soon compared to a billion years” isn’t a particularly interesting time frame.