This. I’ve been searching for a way to articulate this idea for quite some time, and this is the best way I’ve seen it stated.
Thank you. It’s still a bit indistinct to me as yet—I haven’t seen many other people talking about it in these terms, except Karl Schroeder (who explores it a bit in his science fiction writing), but I knew something seemed a little funny when the Rare Earth Hypothesis and its pop-sci cousins started growing in popularity among the transhumanist set. It seems like an awful lot of the background ideas about the Fermi Paradox and its implications for anthropics in the core cluster that LW shares go back to an intellectual movement that came to prominence at a time before we’d discovered more than a tiny handful of exoplanets. Now we know there’s at least one Earth-sized world around Alpha bloody Centauri and even Tau Ceti of all stars is being proposed as rich in worlds; at this rate I personally expect to learn about the probable existence of another biosphere around a star within 100 ly, within my natural lifetime (though, for the reasons expressed in my comment, I’m doubtful we’d be able to reliably notice another civilization unless they signalled semi-deliberately or we got staggeringly lucky and they have a recognizably-similar fossil fuel “spike” within a similar window, meaning we can catch the light of cities on the night side assuming Sufficiently Powerful Telescopes).
I have long suspected that reversion towards (through perhaps not all the way to) the mean is far more likely in our future.
nod I suspect the future probably looks rather weird to LWian eyes, in this regard—neither a reversion to the 10th or 17th century for the rest of human existence, nor much like the most common conceptions of it here (namely: UFAI-driven apocalypse vs FAI-driven technorapture). It’s hard to tease out the threads that seem most relevant to my budding picture of things, but they look something like: increasing efficiency where it’s possible, a gradual net reduction in the stuff economists have been watching grow for the last few generations, some decidedly weirdtopian adaptations in lifestyle that I can only guess at… we’ve learned so much about automation, efficiency, logistics and soforth and it seems like there’s plenty of time to learn a great deal more, such that my brain tries to conjure up visions of a low-energy but surprisingly smart future infrastructure where the world is big again.
Now we know there’s at least one Earth-sized world around Alpha bloody Centauri and even Tau Ceti of all stars is being proposed as rich in worlds; at this rate I personally expect to learn about the probable existence of another biosphere around a star within 100 ly, within my natural lifetime
I think the jury is still out on this… on the one hand we are finding huge numbers of planets, and it is likely that our sampling biases are what push us towards finding all these big “super-earths” close to their parent stars (I take issue with that terminology, calling something something of ~5 earth masses ‘potentially habitable’ or even ‘terrestrial’ is problematic because we have no experience with planets of that size range in our system and you can’t confidently state that most things with that mass would actually necessarily have a surface resembling a rock-to-liquid/gas transition). On the other hand we are finding so many systems that look nothing like ours with compact orbits and arrangements that probably could not have formed that way and thus went through a period of destructive chaos, suggesting that the stability of our system could be an anomaly. I’m waiting on the full several years of Kepler data that should actually be able to detect earth-radius planets at a full AU or so from a star, until then there seem to be too many variables.
though, for the reasons expressed in my comment, I’m doubtful we’d be able to reliably notice another civilization unless they signalled semi-deliberately or we got staggeringly lucky and they have a recognizably-similar fossil fuel “spike” within a similar window, meaning we can catch the light of cities on the night side assuming Sufficiently Powerful Telescopes
I mostly agree. I actually find the ‘great silence’ not particularly puzzling—the only things we have reliably excluded are things like star system scale engineering, and massive radio beacons that either put out large percentages of a planet’s solar input out in the form of omnidirectional radio or ping millions of nearby stars with directional beams on a regular basis. When you consider the vast space of options where such grand things don’t happen, for reasons other than annihilation, you get a different picture. We couldn’t detect our own omnidirectional radiation more than a fraction of a light-year away, and new technologies are actually decreasing it of late. And how many directional messages have we sent out explicitly aimed at other star systems? A dozen? And they would need directional antennas to be picked up. What are the odds that two points in space that don’t know of each other’s existence would first have one point their message in the right direction, and then have the second one look in the correct direction at the right time? Even if you assume there are many thousands of sources in our galaxy (which I think could be a wild overestimate filter or no given the history of terrestrial life), that puts the nearest one hundreds of light years away in a volume containing millions of stars. Even if they have an order of magnitude or three more effort being put out into sending messages, that still isn’t much given the sheer volume. A full galaxy just wouldn’t look different from an empty one to beings like us that have been looking less than a century, if the proposed grand destiny of intelligent life proves to be a ‘sugar rush’ even in the absence of reversion to the mean. (Such a reversion would pretty well certainly still include radio in our toolkit or the toolkit of whoever else was smart enough to figure out electrodynamics, so such a civilization could still be detectable—although what a reversion could lack is the concentrated wealth to build and maintain lots of fifty meter dishes and use them for, effectively, stargazing.)
I suspect the future probably looks rather weird to LWian eyes, in this regard—neither a reversion to the 10th or 17th century for the rest of human existence, nor much like the most common conceptions of it here (namely: UFAI-driven apocalypse vs FAI-driven technorapture).
I would say what it is most likely to resemble is, simply, history. Civilizations rise and fall over centuries (not overnight!) and ours is probably no exception, even if the endpoint might not be as low as past troughs. There are eras of prosperity and eras of destitution, different in different parts of the world as power structures and ecologies shift. Technologies appear, some of them stick around essentialy forever after they are invented and others, like steam heat and clockwork and factories exporting across an entire continent in ancient Rome, get lost when the context that produced them changes. Most eras produce something new that they can pass on usefully to the future, though what they produce that can be perpetuated in a different context would often be unexpected to those in that era.
Thank you. It’s still a bit indistinct to me as yet—I haven’t seen many other people talking about it in these terms, except Karl Schroeder (who explores it a bit in his science fiction writing), but I knew something seemed a little funny when the Rare Earth Hypothesis and its pop-sci cousins started growing in popularity among the transhumanist set. It seems like an awful lot of the background ideas about the Fermi Paradox and its implications for anthropics in the core cluster that LW shares go back to an intellectual movement that came to prominence at a time before we’d discovered more than a tiny handful of exoplanets. Now we know there’s at least one Earth-sized world around Alpha bloody Centauri and even Tau Ceti of all stars is being proposed as rich in worlds; at this rate I personally expect to learn about the probable existence of another biosphere around a star within 100 ly, within my natural lifetime (though, for the reasons expressed in my comment, I’m doubtful we’d be able to reliably notice another civilization unless they signalled semi-deliberately or we got staggeringly lucky and they have a recognizably-similar fossil fuel “spike” within a similar window, meaning we can catch the light of cities on the night side assuming Sufficiently Powerful Telescopes).
nod I suspect the future probably looks rather weird to LWian eyes, in this regard—neither a reversion to the 10th or 17th century for the rest of human existence, nor much like the most common conceptions of it here (namely: UFAI-driven apocalypse vs FAI-driven technorapture). It’s hard to tease out the threads that seem most relevant to my budding picture of things, but they look something like: increasing efficiency where it’s possible, a gradual net reduction in the stuff economists have been watching grow for the last few generations, some decidedly weirdtopian adaptations in lifestyle that I can only guess at… we’ve learned so much about automation, efficiency, logistics and soforth and it seems like there’s plenty of time to learn a great deal more, such that my brain tries to conjure up visions of a low-energy but surprisingly smart future infrastructure where the world is big again.
I think the jury is still out on this… on the one hand we are finding huge numbers of planets, and it is likely that our sampling biases are what push us towards finding all these big “super-earths” close to their parent stars (I take issue with that terminology, calling something something of ~5 earth masses ‘potentially habitable’ or even ‘terrestrial’ is problematic because we have no experience with planets of that size range in our system and you can’t confidently state that most things with that mass would actually necessarily have a surface resembling a rock-to-liquid/gas transition). On the other hand we are finding so many systems that look nothing like ours with compact orbits and arrangements that probably could not have formed that way and thus went through a period of destructive chaos, suggesting that the stability of our system could be an anomaly. I’m waiting on the full several years of Kepler data that should actually be able to detect earth-radius planets at a full AU or so from a star, until then there seem to be too many variables.
I mostly agree. I actually find the ‘great silence’ not particularly puzzling—the only things we have reliably excluded are things like star system scale engineering, and massive radio beacons that either put out large percentages of a planet’s solar input out in the form of omnidirectional radio or ping millions of nearby stars with directional beams on a regular basis. When you consider the vast space of options where such grand things don’t happen, for reasons other than annihilation, you get a different picture. We couldn’t detect our own omnidirectional radiation more than a fraction of a light-year away, and new technologies are actually decreasing it of late. And how many directional messages have we sent out explicitly aimed at other star systems? A dozen? And they would need directional antennas to be picked up. What are the odds that two points in space that don’t know of each other’s existence would first have one point their message in the right direction, and then have the second one look in the correct direction at the right time? Even if you assume there are many thousands of sources in our galaxy (which I think could be a wild overestimate filter or no given the history of terrestrial life), that puts the nearest one hundreds of light years away in a volume containing millions of stars. Even if they have an order of magnitude or three more effort being put out into sending messages, that still isn’t much given the sheer volume. A full galaxy just wouldn’t look different from an empty one to beings like us that have been looking less than a century, if the proposed grand destiny of intelligent life proves to be a ‘sugar rush’ even in the absence of reversion to the mean. (Such a reversion would pretty well certainly still include radio in our toolkit or the toolkit of whoever else was smart enough to figure out electrodynamics, so such a civilization could still be detectable—although what a reversion could lack is the concentrated wealth to build and maintain lots of fifty meter dishes and use them for, effectively, stargazing.)
I would say what it is most likely to resemble is, simply, history. Civilizations rise and fall over centuries (not overnight!) and ours is probably no exception, even if the endpoint might not be as low as past troughs. There are eras of prosperity and eras of destitution, different in different parts of the world as power structures and ecologies shift. Technologies appear, some of them stick around essentialy forever after they are invented and others, like steam heat and clockwork and factories exporting across an entire continent in ancient Rome, get lost when the context that produced them changes. Most eras produce something new that they can pass on usefully to the future, though what they produce that can be perpetuated in a different context would often be unexpected to those in that era.