
The Sustainability Solution to the Fermi Paradox (2009) - snake117
http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.0568
======
Pitarou
TLDR

The Fermi Paradox (a.k.a. "Why hasn't some alien civilisation already visited
us?") contains a hidden assumption that a space-faring civilisation will
expand rapidly to fill the galaxy. But such expansionist civilisations are
likely to collapse when they reach their limits and exhaust their resources.

So we should be looking for either small civilisations that have managed their
growth, or the "graveyards" of civilisations that didn't manage their growth,
reached their limits, and collapsed.

And the implications for humanity, with its own expansion and resource
problems, are clear.

------
exratione
Like near all potential solutions this fails on the "it only takes one" point.

The Fermi Paradox is better thought of as the Wilderness Paradox. Why is
everything that we see natural, explained solely by the laws of physics?

It only takes one small faction within one advanced civilization to launch the
self-replicating probes that will convert all matter in a galaxy into
someone's paradise, be that computronium or habitats or whatever. Most likely
computronium, given the economics that drive expansion. Even the stars will be
dismantled once it is economically viable to use their matter in another way.

The point here is that this engineering won't look natural, even in its early
stages, and it won't look natural from a very, very long way away. Yet
everything we see looks natural, out to the nearest 100,000 galaxies, a simply
preposterous span of stars and planets to argue that no small factions capable
of doing this have arisen. Yet do we see the evidence of their existence? We
do not.

[https://www.exratione.com/2015/05/the-cosmological-
noocene/](https://www.exratione.com/2015/05/the-cosmological-noocene/)

Here is a sketch of the future, without any specific dates assigned to its
milestones. The human mind is reverse engineered. It is run in software. A
million variants and improvements are constructed. Molecular nanotechnology is
established and becomes a mature industry, available to everyone. Anything and
everything can be built efficiently given the raw materials and a spec. From
an economic perspective those who thrive are those who make the most efficient
use of the matter that they own, and those who gain control over the most
matter: quality versus quantity shift back and forth in the degree of
advantage as the ability to accurately and rapidly manipulate large masses of
matter at the atomic level and lower grows. Matter is most economically
efficient when incorporated as the workings of an intelligent entity. The end
state here is a continuum of thinking matter, and there are countless
arrangements by which matter might be made aware. Our evolved biology is among
the least intricate and least capable of these possibilities. At the most
efficient we might envisage space- and matter-efficient computational
processors plus the necessary workings for support: communication, energy,
repair, and so forth. The higher the fraction of that mix that can be devoted
to data processing and transfer, the more economically effective the entities
who use that system as a substrate.

Evolved intelligences are not rational actors in search of growth above all
other goals. We have parks and entertainment industries, for example. There is
no reason why constructed intelligences should be any different, but equally
they have one important quality: they can change themselves and their progeny
in defined ways to achieve defined outcomes in mental state. The alterations
and experiments that provide economic advantages will prosper. Entities who
choose to incorporate an urge to growth will become the majority. At some
point the value of an asteroid, a moon, a planetary crust, or a star in its
natural state falls below the value of the same matter dismantled and used as
raw materials for computational processing. After that it is just a matter of
time before this solar system, a wilderness at present, and a collection of
parks in ages ahead, is transitioned into a more efficient arrangement of
matter in which near every portion of the whole is intelligent. This change
will propagate outward to other stellar systems, without end, driven by simple
economic considerations. A sea of cultures of a complexity and scope beyond
our imaginings, and our world today the tiniest mote of a seed, that could be
emulated by the smallest discrete material unit of computational processing in
that future substrate.

So it is less a matter of manifest destiny that we will convert our entire
future light cone into intelligence, and more a matter of economic
inevitability, the destination at the end of the random walk of choice simply
because some classes of choice will be made more frequently than others. The
outcome of human action writ large. All of this, however, indicates that there
is something very important that we at present do not understand about the
nature of reality. Nothing in our present situation as a species appears to be
exceptional: stars are everywhere in vast numbers, planets also, and complex
organic molecules are seen wherever we have the ability to observe them. Thus
intelligence should arise elsewhere. The age of the universe is very long in
comparison to the time taken for our spontaneous generation, yet we see no
evidence that any other intelligence has come before us. This is often
expressed as the Fermi Paradox, but is perhaps best thought of as the
Wilderness Paradox, which is to ask why everything we observe, out to the very
limits of the visible universe, is apparently natural and unaltered. Where are
the signs of what we know is possible and inevitable for an intelligent
evolved species, the conversion of matter to more efficient forms on a vast
scale?

The only solid solution to the Fermi Paradox that does not require some new
and presently missing piece of scientific understanding is the Simulation
Argument: that we are in a box and walled off from the real world, whatever
that might be, created by some demiurge for purposes guessable but ultimately
unknowable through any action on our part. Prosaically that demiurge might be
a descendant of a past humanity similar to ours, an entity that is running one
of countless ancestor simulations for scientific reasons. Far less prosaic
options are also possible, in which the demiurge is simulating from first
principles a radically different cosmology from its own and thus its nature
and motivations are inscrutable. These possibilities of the Simulation
Argument are dissatisfying to explore, however, for all the same reasons as
the brain in a jar thought experiment is a dead end. Best to assume it is not
true, as it if is there is nothing useful you can do about it, individually or
collectively. Pascal's wager turned inside-out.

It is more interesting to speculate on what it is that we don't understand at
present about the nature of reality. There are numerous candidates, and most
present thinking is directed towards those related to enforcing our rarity,
often expressed as the Great Filter, one or more enormously unlikely steps
that lie between the origin of a barren world scattered with a few organic
compounds and the destination of an intelligent species engaged in repurposing
of raw materials on a vast scale. All proposed Great Filters are very
speculative; there is a great deal of room to argue about odds when you only
have one example to work with, or events of the distant past must be
reconstructed from theory, or future development of the species considered in
detail rather than at a very high level, all which makes coming to any sort of
rigorous conclusion next to impossible. All that is practical to achieve is to
build the shape of the argument that would be sufficient if the actual numbers
and proposed events in fact exist in reality. Given this uncertainty, any
proposed Great Filter becomes an ever less satisfying answer the further we
look outward and the more galaxies we see without any sign of massive
engineering. It only serves to argue for our uniqueness, which is implausible
given what we presently know and the isotropic nature of all other observed
aspects of the natural universe across vast spans of distance and time.

Per our present understanding of physics and intelligent economic activity, we
will turn every part of that great span into our descendants if not diverted
or stopped by some outside influence, stars and all. The cosmological noocene,
an ocean of intelligence. That the natural universe remains present to be used
by us indicates that something is awry, however, that some vital and important
understanding is missing, and as a species we are still just making the first
fumbling explorations of the bounds of the possible with regards to what it is
that we don't know.

~~~
StephanTLavavej
> The only solid solution to the Fermi Paradox that does not require some new
> and presently missing piece of scientific understanding

There's at least one more: somebody's gotta be first (in our light cone).

