I don’t think the intelligence consistently leads to self-annihilation hypothesis is possible. At least a few times it would amount to robust self-preservation.
Well.. I guess I think it boils down to the dark forest hypothesis. The question is whether your volume of space is likely to contain a certain number of berserkers, and the number wouldn’t have to be large for them to suppress the whole thing.
I’ve always felt the logic of berserker extortion doesn’t work, but occasionally you’d get a species that just earnestly wants the forest to be dark and isn’t very troubled by their own extinction, no extortion logic required. This would be extremely rare, but the question is, how rare.
Intelligence can’t evolve as there is not enough selection pressure in the universe with near-light-speed travel.
Intelligence self-terminates every time.
Berserkers and dark forest: intelligence is here, but we observe only field animals. Or field animals are designed in a way to increase uncertainty of the observer about possible berserkers.
Observation selection: in the regions of universe where intelligence exists, there are no young civilizations as they are destroyed—or exist but are observed by berserkers. So we can observe only field animal-dominated regions or berserkers’ worlds.
Original intelligence has decayed, but field animals are actually robots from some abandoned Disneyland. Or maybe they are paperclips of some non-aligned AI. They are products of civilization decay.
I don’t think the intelligence consistently leads to self-annihilation hypothesis is possible. At least a few times it would amount to robust self-preservation.
Well.. I guess I think it boils down to the dark forest hypothesis. The question is whether your volume of space is likely to contain a certain number of berserkers, and the number wouldn’t have to be large for them to suppress the whole thing.
I’ve always felt the logic of berserker extortion doesn’t work, but occasionally you’d get a species that just earnestly wants the forest to be dark and isn’t very troubled by their own extinction, no extortion logic required. This would be extremely rare, but the question is, how rare.
So there are several possible explanations:
Intelligence can’t evolve as there is not enough selection pressure in the universe with near-light-speed travel.
Intelligence self-terminates every time.
Berserkers and dark forest: intelligence is here, but we observe only field animals. Or field animals are designed in a way to increase uncertainty of the observer about possible berserkers.
Observation selection: in the regions of universe where intelligence exists, there are no young civilizations as they are destroyed—or exist but are observed by berserkers. So we can observe only field animal-dominated regions or berserkers’ worlds.
Original intelligence has decayed, but field animals are actually robots from some abandoned Disneyland. Or maybe they are paperclips of some non-aligned AI. They are products of civilization decay.