We take it for granted that evolution supports expansion, but does it really?
Remembers, evolved beings are not maximizers, they just execute behavior that was adaptive in the past. Was flying to the stars ever adaptive in the past?
Something undergoing evolution is undergoing self-replication, so as far as I can tell expansion is definitionally needed. However, I think the second part of your question is more telling—colonising space was not adaptive for life until now. However, intelligence is the thing that has made it possible. If we build something that is adapted to living in space then I see no real barrier to it then colonising space.
In nature, organisms move towards immediately useful resources. They expect the new environment to be approximately the same as the one they are coming from.
For humans, it would be easy to colonize the universe if it looked like from a hundred years old sci-fi: a distant place with a breathable atmosphere, where you can plant a few edible plants you brought from Earth (and the soil provides them all necessary nutrients) and you are done. Even if it required building a sophisticated spaceship, it would only be a temporary necessity to get us from place A to place B. That is the kind of expansion that nature trained us to do: moving to a new environment that is fundamentally the same. It could even have some new animals, as long as at least some of them would be edible.
Now we know that the space is nothing like this. There is no friendly place. Every single aspect of each environment is trying to kill you, whether it’s gravity or atmosphere or chemistry or the lack of biology. Living on the bottom of the ocean, or inside an active volcano, would be much easier; at least you would be protected from cosmic radiation.
In space, the smallest mistake will kill you. A smallest hole means you lose the atmosphere, game over. You can’t find the right kind of mineral you need, game over. Maybe one day we will be able to collect the energy of the stars and use it to transform materials any way we need, but it is not obvious how to get from here to there.
In other words, I can imagine that space colonization is the Great Filter. Maybe even for the AIs.
I am not an expert, but I think that from economical perspective, so far each space travel was a huge loss. I don’t think that we are anywhere near the technological level where the spaceship could at least harvest its own fuel from somewhere in the space, which seems like a necessity for sustained space travel. Otherwise, we run out of the fossil fuels on Earth, and it’s game over.
For organic life, not for machines. We have machines crawling all over space and already exiting the solar system, still going.
TBH this analysis seems quite far removed from the capbilities usually imagined for superintelligence. If a machine intelligence can nano-bot humanity out of extinction in 1 second then it can definitely go to the moon more easily than we can (which we did with relative ease). If AI can’t colonise space, then I’m no longer afraid of it at all.
Fair point. Cosmic radiation is also hostile to machines, probably more deadly to the more sensitive ones, but I guess a combination of shielding, self-checking, and redundancy could solve it.
We don’t have data on what a typical AI might look like—I mean, an AI developed by a random space civilization. Do they all get some variant of LLMs first? Something that can copy their skills and become smart enough to destroy them, but also has a nonzero amount of hallucination, especially in unfamiliar scenarios, which afterwards at some point destroys the AI itself before it can conquer the universe? But this is pure speculation with no data, the imaginations could go in any direction...
Haha I have no idea! I agree the possibility space is huge. All I do know is that we don’t see any evidence of alien AIs around us, so they are a poor explanation as a great filter for other alien races (unless they kill those races and then for some reason kill themselves, too / decide to be non-expansionist every single time).
We take it for granted that evolution supports expansion, but does it really?
Remembers, evolved beings are not maximizers, they just execute behavior that was adaptive in the past. Was flying to the stars ever adaptive in the past?
Something undergoing evolution is undergoing self-replication, so as far as I can tell expansion is definitionally needed. However, I think the second part of your question is more telling—colonising space was not adaptive for life until now. However, intelligence is the thing that has made it possible. If we build something that is adapted to living in space then I see no real barrier to it then colonising space.
In nature, organisms move towards immediately useful resources. They expect the new environment to be approximately the same as the one they are coming from.
For humans, it would be easy to colonize the universe if it looked like from a hundred years old sci-fi: a distant place with a breathable atmosphere, where you can plant a few edible plants you brought from Earth (and the soil provides them all necessary nutrients) and you are done. Even if it required building a sophisticated spaceship, it would only be a temporary necessity to get us from place A to place B. That is the kind of expansion that nature trained us to do: moving to a new environment that is fundamentally the same. It could even have some new animals, as long as at least some of them would be edible.
Now we know that the space is nothing like this. There is no friendly place. Every single aspect of each environment is trying to kill you, whether it’s gravity or atmosphere or chemistry or the lack of biology. Living on the bottom of the ocean, or inside an active volcano, would be much easier; at least you would be protected from cosmic radiation.
In space, the smallest mistake will kill you. A smallest hole means you lose the atmosphere, game over. You can’t find the right kind of mineral you need, game over. Maybe one day we will be able to collect the energy of the stars and use it to transform materials any way we need, but it is not obvious how to get from here to there.
In other words, I can imagine that space colonization is the Great Filter. Maybe even for the AIs.
I am not an expert, but I think that from economical perspective, so far each space travel was a huge loss. I don’t think that we are anywhere near the technological level where the spaceship could at least harvest its own fuel from somewhere in the space, which seems like a necessity for sustained space travel. Otherwise, we run out of the fossil fuels on Earth, and it’s game over.
“In space, the smallest mistake will kill you”
For organic life, not for machines. We have machines crawling all over space and already exiting the solar system, still going.
TBH this analysis seems quite far removed from the capbilities usually imagined for superintelligence. If a machine intelligence can nano-bot humanity out of extinction in 1 second then it can definitely go to the moon more easily than we can (which we did with relative ease). If AI can’t colonise space, then I’m no longer afraid of it at all.
Fair point. Cosmic radiation is also hostile to machines, probably more deadly to the more sensitive ones, but I guess a combination of shielding, self-checking, and redundancy could solve it.
We don’t have data on what a typical AI might look like—I mean, an AI developed by a random space civilization. Do they all get some variant of LLMs first? Something that can copy their skills and become smart enough to destroy them, but also has a nonzero amount of hallucination, especially in unfamiliar scenarios, which afterwards at some point destroys the AI itself before it can conquer the universe? But this is pure speculation with no data, the imaginations could go in any direction...
Haha I have no idea! I agree the possibility space is huge. All I do know is that we don’t see any evidence of alien AIs around us, so they are a poor explanation as a great filter for other alien races (unless they kill those races and then for some reason kill themselves, too / decide to be non-expansionist every single time).