One observation on #2: because they move and colonize faster, evolution will happen at literal light-speed. Viral evolution will have nothing on how fast ‘UAP’ life evolves when you have densely colonized the entire universe and move & metabolize at literally light-speed; that represents who knows how many quadrillions times more individual units of selection, operating billions of times faster, than life on Earth. (Compare the frequencies of photonics vs electronics vs biological devices: terahertz vs gigahertz vs hertz.) UAP life would, universe-wide, go through more selection in seconds than Earth life has total to date. Anything that is possible with non-zero probability will be feasible, and fast. This includes intelligence. They will either be viruses or deities. (They will not be playing chase with fighter pilots for kicks.)
The primary limit would be that lightspeed limits the universe-wide propagation of more fit UAPs (hypothetically, a superior UAP on the other edge of the visible universe would still be billions of years away from reaching us), but this would just lead to convergent evolution as an innovation emerges repeatedly in multiple patches and starts spreading in ‘shockwaves’, recapitulating ‘grabby aliens’ dynamics except much faster.
So interesting UAPs are ruled out even more strongly by the complete absence of any discernible major heterogeneity in the cosmos: if UAPs are not purely epiphenomenal, if there is any way whatsoever for them to affect regular matter or stellar evolution or radiation or light at scale, we would see the different bubbles and be affected by UAPs, rather than seeing a clockwork universe unspooling from the Big Bang.
How can photonics work without matter? I thought the problem was that you couldn’t make a switch, because light waves just pass through each other (the equations are linear, so the sum of two valid waves is also a valid wave).
I have an intuition that complex knots in magnetic field may be relatively stable and I linked an article that explores the topic of such knots. There are over100 ideas about the physics of ball lightnings and some of them explore quite exotic types of matter.
But the nature of such matter was not my central argument: I am more interested in population dynamic, assuming that such matter is possible.
If we look on insects, we will see that they were not capable to evolve general intelligence despite the fact that they exist for 400 mln years, they are much more numerous than mammals and they have very high speed of evolution, in which a new species can appear in a few years and each tree can have different species of beetles in jungles.
Insects are locked in evolutionary local minima, a dead end, probably explained by size limitation. The same is true for plants, bacteria and even birds. there are probably many dead ends in evolution which can’t generate general intelligence despite intense evolutionary process. We can’t estimate how many evolutionary dead ends are possible because of observation selection effect: we are not in such dead end.
So, field-animals may have intense evolution, but still are not capable to generate true general intelligence, and being in evolutionary dead end is rather normal.
Another explanation is more sinister: all general intelligence systems tend to self-terminate. Civilizations terminate via x-risks, and AIs via wireheading, meaningless of any goal and halting problems. Only crazy limited intelligence can survive, and thus absurdity of UAP is their nature, not a bug, which needs to be explained.
If we look on insects, we will see that they were not capable to evolve general intelligence despite the fact that they exist for 400 mln years, they are much more numerous than mammals and they have very high speed of evolution, in which a new species can appear in a few years and each tree can have different species of beetles in jungles.
This analogy doesn’t work because humans exist. Life on Earth did evolve intelligence in a rather short time and with an astronomically tiny amount of resources (only that which you can obtain on 1 small rocky planet). UAP would need to be so locked into niches with evolutionary strength many quadrillions times stronger than the difficulty in evolving intelligence on Earth in order for nowhere in the universe to create intelligent UAPs (and given that we are talking about quadrillions upon quadrillions upon quadrillions, do so many many times in many locations) which can then rapidly dominate in the way that humans do now in terms of passing a threshold and now controlling a large fraction of biomass and massively altering almost every trait of the Earth.
It would be completely arbitrary and clearly motivated only by saving the appearances, but yes, you pretty much need a hard fundamental limit to explain why they are so epiphenomenal despite such cosmic resources. There’s no plausible story where they can manipulate the mortal realm enough to screw with pilots but also we observe the universe exactly as it is. (And the easiest hard limit is simply that, like regular aliens, “they don’t exist”. It is hard to change the universe noticeably when you don’t exist.)
In a sense, it similar to the Fermi paradox: there are billions of billions planets, but no civilizations. And one explanation could be similar: as soon as intelligence got to the critical mass and evolve in general intelligence, it kills itself – the same way as the critical mass of uranium always quickly dissipated.
So only crazy beings, especially the ones that are locked into dead end of intelligence’s evolution can survive. And it is consistent with our observations of powerful but absurd beings.
Light speed migrations with no borders means homogeneous ecosystems, which can be very constrained things.
In our ecosystems, we get pockets of experimentation. There are whole islands where the birds were allowed to be impractical aesthetes (indonesia) or flightless blobs (new zealand). In the field-animal world, islands don’t exist, pockets of experimentation like this might not occur anywhere in the observable universe.
If general intelligence for field-animals costs a lot, has no immediate advantages (consistently takes say, a thousand years of ornament status before it becomes profitable), then it wouldn’t get to arise. Could that be the case?
Alternatively, maybe any intelligence above, say, IQ 250 self-terminates either because it discovers the meaninglessness of everything or through effective wars and other existential risks. The rigid simplicity of field animals protects them from all this. They are super-effective survivors, like bacteria which have lived everywhere on Earth for billions of years
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.
Returning here after 3 years after reading about ghost drones flap. One thing that occurred to me is that evolutionary dynamic in vast unbounded spaces is different from the one in confined spaces. When toads were released in Australia, they were selected for longer legs and quicker jumping ability. These long-legged toads reached farther parts of Australia.
Another direction of evolution of ‘space animals’ involves stability over very long time and mimicry in the case of “dark forrest”.
One observation on #2: because they move and colonize faster, evolution will happen at literal light-speed. Viral evolution will have nothing on how fast ‘UAP’ life evolves when you have densely colonized the entire universe and move & metabolize at literally light-speed; that represents who knows how many quadrillions times more individual units of selection, operating billions of times faster, than life on Earth. (Compare the frequencies of photonics vs electronics vs biological devices: terahertz vs gigahertz vs hertz.) UAP life would, universe-wide, go through more selection in seconds than Earth life has total to date. Anything that is possible with non-zero probability will be feasible, and fast. This includes intelligence. They will either be viruses or deities. (They will not be playing chase with fighter pilots for kicks.)
The primary limit would be that lightspeed limits the universe-wide propagation of more fit UAPs (hypothetically, a superior UAP on the other edge of the visible universe would still be billions of years away from reaching us), but this would just lead to convergent evolution as an innovation emerges repeatedly in multiple patches and starts spreading in ‘shockwaves’, recapitulating ‘grabby aliens’ dynamics except much faster.
So interesting UAPs are ruled out even more strongly by the complete absence of any discernible major heterogeneity in the cosmos: if UAPs are not purely epiphenomenal, if there is any way whatsoever for them to affect regular matter or stellar evolution or radiation or light at scale, we would see the different bubbles and be affected by UAPs, rather than seeing a clockwork universe unspooling from the Big Bang.
How can photonics work without matter? I thought the problem was that you couldn’t make a switch, because light waves just pass through each other (the equations are linear, so the sum of two valid waves is also a valid wave).
I have an intuition that complex knots in magnetic field may be relatively stable and I linked an article that explores the topic of such knots. There are over100 ideas about the physics of ball lightnings and some of them explore quite exotic types of matter.
But the nature of such matter was not my central argument: I am more interested in population dynamic, assuming that such matter is possible.
If we look on insects, we will see that they were not capable to evolve general intelligence despite the fact that they exist for 400 mln years, they are much more numerous than mammals and they have very high speed of evolution, in which a new species can appear in a few years and each tree can have different species of beetles in jungles.
Insects are locked in evolutionary local minima, a dead end, probably explained by size limitation. The same is true for plants, bacteria and even birds. there are probably many dead ends in evolution which can’t generate general intelligence despite intense evolutionary process. We can’t estimate how many evolutionary dead ends are possible because of observation selection effect: we are not in such dead end.
So, field-animals may have intense evolution, but still are not capable to generate true general intelligence, and being in evolutionary dead end is rather normal.
Another explanation is more sinister: all general intelligence systems tend to self-terminate. Civilizations terminate via x-risks, and AIs via wireheading, meaningless of any goal and halting problems. Only crazy limited intelligence can survive, and thus absurdity of UAP is their nature, not a bug, which needs to be explained.
This analogy doesn’t work because humans exist. Life on Earth did evolve intelligence in a rather short time and with an astronomically tiny amount of resources (only that which you can obtain on 1 small rocky planet). UAP would need to be so locked into niches with evolutionary strength many quadrillions times stronger than the difficulty in evolving intelligence on Earth in order for nowhere in the universe to create intelligent UAPs (and given that we are talking about quadrillions upon quadrillions upon quadrillions, do so many many times in many locations) which can then rapidly dominate in the way that humans do now in terms of passing a threshold and now controlling a large fraction of biomass and massively altering almost every trait of the Earth.
Unless you posit some fundamental limit on possible intelligence/computational power for field-beings. Would that be too implausible?
It would be completely arbitrary and clearly motivated only by saving the appearances, but yes, you pretty much need a hard fundamental limit to explain why they are so epiphenomenal despite such cosmic resources. There’s no plausible story where they can manipulate the mortal realm enough to screw with pilots but also we observe the universe exactly as it is. (And the easiest hard limit is simply that, like regular aliens, “they don’t exist”. It is hard to change the universe noticeably when you don’t exist.)
In a sense, it similar to the Fermi paradox: there are billions of billions planets, but no civilizations. And one explanation could be similar: as soon as intelligence got to the critical mass and evolve in general intelligence, it kills itself – the same way as the critical mass of uranium always quickly dissipated.
So only crazy beings, especially the ones that are locked into dead end of intelligence’s evolution can survive. And it is consistent with our observations of powerful but absurd beings.
Light speed migrations with no borders means homogeneous ecosystems, which can be very constrained things.
In our ecosystems, we get pockets of experimentation. There are whole islands where the birds were allowed to be impractical aesthetes (indonesia) or flightless blobs (new zealand). In the field-animal world, islands don’t exist, pockets of experimentation like this might not occur anywhere in the observable universe.
If general intelligence for field-animals costs a lot, has no immediate advantages (consistently takes say, a thousand years of ornament status before it becomes profitable), then it wouldn’t get to arise. Could that be the case?
Good point.
Alternatively, maybe any intelligence above, say, IQ 250 self-terminates either because it discovers the meaninglessness of everything or through effective wars and other existential risks. The rigid simplicity of field animals protects them from all this. They are super-effective survivors, like bacteria which have lived everywhere on Earth for billions of years
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.
Returning here after 3 years after reading about ghost drones flap.
One thing that occurred to me is that evolutionary dynamic in vast unbounded spaces is different from the one in confined spaces. When toads were released in Australia, they were selected for longer legs and quicker jumping ability. These long-legged toads reached farther parts of Australia.
Another direction of evolution of ‘space animals’ involves stability over very long time and mimicry in the case of “dark forrest”.