
Computing and the Fermi Paradox: A New Idea Emerges – The Aliens Are All Asleep - simierno
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/computing-and-the-fermi-paradox-a-new-idea-emergestheyre-all-asleep
======
joe_the_user
_The Fermi Paradox is the contradiction between the very reasonable surmise
that there must be other forms of technologically advanced life out there
somewhere in our great galaxy and the complete lack of any evidence for it._

But not quite. This paradox assumes that a _more_ technologically advanced
society would naturally expand it's energy usage and output to the point that
it could be detected by us. That is, expand it's energy output to be _much_
more than our civilization's output since we actually _couldn 't_ detect a
civilization of our own scale if it was on even the nearest star.

So the paradox is entirely speculative. Alienation civilizations might go in
all sorts of ways. They might spend their resources on computation (as
suggested by the article), they might consciously create low-energy-usage
steady-state utopias, they might eventually destroy themselves, they might
just never discover a way to attain such high energy usage, they might become
so efficient they don't leak energy into space or something else we haven't
thought it.

It's not that Fermi is entirely ridiculous to consider but the way is
presented, a lot of people wouldn't know that the universe could _full_ of
earth-level societies and we wouldn't know and that's a bit annoying.

~~~
davedx
But that’s the thing, if our galaxy had lots of 20-21st century Earth level
civilizations, we would be able to detect them with our existing SETI
programmes.

Personally I like the hypothesis that states eventually all comms will be
encrypted and therefore indistinguishable from white noise.

~~~
joe_the_user
We could not detect civilizations at our level because standard transmissions
decay the square of the distance and so such would be quantum noise by the
time they got to the nearest start. And less than that by the time they
further.

~~~
davedx
According to the SETI FAQ, it would be possible for alien civilizations to
detect our higher powered radar systems with SETI setups similar to our own.

Do you dispute this claim from SETI? Can you provide a citation?

~~~
quickben
He was approaching this from physics and whatever that inverse distance power
propagination law is called for 3d space.

------
defined
Something to consider is that the universe is 13-odd billion years old, and
from our perspective, the edge of the observable universe is about 46 billion
light years away.

At interstellar distances, it is very difficult to detect something unless it
is emitting something: electromagnetic energy or gravitational waves (and
those are only possible to detect when there are super-massive bodies doing
something extremely energetic, like two black holes or neutron stars merging).

Earth's man-made electromagnetic radius is about 110 light years. We're pretty
much invisible to any other life out there.

But what about aliens that have been around for a long time? Wouldn't we see
some evidence of them?

Well, the other problem is that space itself is expanding. The _observable_
universe is 91 billion light years in diameter, but as space expands, the
farthest galaxies are receding from us at ever-increasing speeds, eventually
becoming invisible to us as well.

The unimaginably vast spatial and temporal scale of the universe means that
countless alien civilizations may have come and gone, along with any sign of
their history if their light waves are outside of our observable universe. Or
their signals arrived and ceased long before humans even existed, let alone
had the technological capabilities required to receive and interpret such
signals (arguably, only since the advent of digital computers).

Factor in the 100 billion (or maybe 10 times more[1]) galaxies that we can
see, and the 160 billion stars (solar systems, possibly) per galaxy, and the
probability that we will detect an alien civilization (or vice-versa), where
we are and _when_ we are, in a universe that is mostly empty space, before we
ourselves die out, seems rather small.

[1]:
[https://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1620/](https://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1620/)

~~~
acqq
And analyzing the biology history, from 4.6 billion years of Earth existence,
or from 13.7 billion years of universe's, for only 60 years humanity can
detect the signals from space. Every step toward that wasn't "inevitable" but
improbable. There weren't multicelular life until around two billion years
ago, but it took then two billion years and a lot of accident to have the
communicating capable humans.

And then, how long are we to last with this capabilities? We are much less
smart than most believe, especially in preserving conditions for a
communicating civilisation.

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camillomiller
My humble impression is that each and every philosophical hypotesis we make is
somewhat based on human paradygms, structures, and super-structures. Why can’t
we accept that we populated this world for the equivalent of a cosmic blink,
and we are therefore unequipped to even grasp the existence of other life
forms?

I am a fan of Bostrom’s conjecture about the simulation, though. 1/3 is a damn
high probability. At the same time all the examples we make to wrap our heads
around these mastodontic concepts are so trivial and so inherently human, that
I wonder how can we really take our own musings seriously. We might be able to
escape the boundaries of Earth’s gravity at some point, but will we ever be
able to escape the boundaries of our human thought?

~~~
InclinedPlane
I'm reminded of the old problem of the flight of bumble bees. Someone did some
calculations on bees, modeling their flight using the same properties of
aerodynamics as fixed wing aircraft, and they came to the conclusion that bees
couldn't fly. Of course the obvious answer was that bees simply don't fly the
way that fixed wing aircraft do and we merely did not understand how they flew
at the time (we do know). But imagine an alternate world, a world where bees
and other flying insects did not exist, then the equivalent calculation might
be taken much more seriously about the impossibility of flying insects.

Similarly, what do we know about hyper advanced technological civilizations
with the capability of colonizing galaxies? Basically nothing. So any model we
have of them is fundamentally invalid. Even if we pretend that layering on a
bunch of "conservative assumptions" can remove that fundamental difficulty of
having zero knowledge of such civilizations, it very much does not. At the end
of the day this is a problem that is beyond our current understanding and we
cannot make any firm statements about it one way or another.

~~~
KozmoNau7
We're making the very best guesses humanly possible (literally), but we are
still just guessing.

Unless (or until) we meet actual aliens, that is all we can do.

------
DarkTree
One of the comments at the bottom of the post points out what I believe to be
a likely scenario:

"As we develop VR tech that allows us to simulate any world we desire,
recreational or purpose driven, there is less and less reason to explore the
rest of the universe."

Using humanity as a example for how intelligent life advances, we can look at
the developed nations. The develop nations are the ones who would create any
sort of technology that would get us out of the solar system and into contact
with other life. Most, if not all developed nations are built through
commercialization of products, with the citizens consuming those products.
Only a very, very small portion of people are working on the advanced
technology to take us elsewhere. So the majority of our species are not
advancing galactic technology, but they are becoming larger consumers of
entertainment, at least on the scale since early civilizations. Keeping that
in mind, we are also somewhat physically locked in our solar system due to the
laws of physics, at least in the near term. So, to me it would seem much more
likely that instead of advancing space tech to the point where we are sending
robots to other planets to self-replicate and spread across the universe, that
by that time we would have already perfected VR and that our entertainment-
based population would be well-satisfied simply living in our perfect little
VR worlds. The two scenarios aren't mutually-exclusive. We are in fact
advancing VR and building rockets for Mars as I write this, but I think it's
also possible that simulating our reality could replace our desire to move
outward. Since the universe is seemingly too far out of reach, we will just
create our own here, for cheaper, sooner.

~~~
qznc
There seems to be a force which makes humans disperse. We settle on every part
of this planet even in uncomfortable regions. Some people want to settle on
Mars. (Curiously, nobody wants to live on our moon?)

There also is a force which makes humans cluster. Silicon Valley is the
biggest cluster of IT and VC at the moment. Accelerando (by Charles Stross)
describes vividly how an advanced AI civilisation still clusters (Mainly
because solar/fusion power and communication speed).

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pmontra
If you sleep you're at the mercy of who doesn't sleep. You can take
countermeasures but you're going to have surprises when your wake up.

Btw, the latest scifi I read on the subject is
[http://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/fermis-last-
surv...](http://compellingsciencefiction.com/stories/fermis-last-
survivor.html)

~~~
jacobush
I'm thinking in a way, those awake may be at the mercy of those who sleep. Say
the sleepers could hide - they could avoid a lot of turmoil, like these bamboo
species that germinate for a hundred years, thus avoiding herbivores and
vermin. Sleepers also can presumably also conserve resources better while
those awake may build, and loose empires in the process.

~~~
pmontra
They would be betting they're able to hide themselves and their resources for
all those years. It also requires faith in their own scientific discoveries
(the universe will be like what they predict it to be) and much group
discipline and trust. What if we could go to sleep for some 100k or 1M year to
wake up in a planet that had fixed the excess CO2? Would everybody do it, no
cheating? Not with current humankind. Great matter for scifi.

------
pklausler
We couldn’t detect a remote civilization at a 21st century equivalent stage of
development. But at 22nd century level, they’d be able to launch a Bracewell-
von Neumann self-replicating interstellar probe... and it would take just
_one_ such event to lead to the permanent saturation of the Galaxy by its
descendants. So where are they? The only really satisfactory conclusion is
that we’re the first or only civilization to approach a BvN launch.

~~~
Chathamization
> The only really satisfactory conclusion is that we’re the first or only
> civilization to approach a BvN launch.

That's carrying a lot of assumptions. That there's not a probe lying somewhere
in the solar system watching us, that aliens haven't found a better way to
observe us than probes, that they even care about observing us in the first
place. Take the last one for example - 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone.
It's entirely possible that we're not important enough for advanced societies
to care, the way you're not going to stop and mess with every random anthill
you pass by.

Imagine a couple of tigers talking. "Someone says there are 9 billion humans
in the world." "That makes no sense. Take the amount of good hunting habitats
in the world, divide it by the amount of territory an adult male would need to
call their own, and divide that by the number of humans. You would have
multiple humans fighting for each chunk of territory, and marking their scent
everywhere. Yet I don't smell any human urine so the question is...where is
everyone?"

As an aside, why do people focus so much on self replicating probes? Assuming
aliens did want to send out a probe fleet - why not simply mass produce probes
in one system (or a handful of systems) and send each in turn to their
destinations? Having to accelerate, decelerate, build a probe, have the new
one accelerate, decelerate, build another probe, have this new one accelerate,
decelerate, etc., seems like it would take a lot longer than simply sending a
probe directly to its destination (no need to constantly decelerate along the
way, no need to waste energy moving replication units, etc.).

~~~
marcosdumay
The thing about the self replicating probes is that they are sufficient for
taking over the entire galaxy.

That doesn't mean that they are optimal. The Fermi paradox does not care about
optimal, just possible.

~~~
vorg
The problem with self-replicating probes is they're likely to break down after
so many legs. And every time they decelerate, they need to get more energy
from the star system before accelerating again -- their AI might not be
equipped to handle every situation they encounter, so failure to continue
their mission might happen that way.

~~~
pklausler
You miss the point about replication.

~~~
vorg
In order to replicate, a probe needs material from the star system it's
visiting, stuff like iron and silicon. That process is likely to break down
after so many journeys, so no more replicants. The probes would put their own
AI into the child probes, including their own random defects. It would take a
lot of trial and error, each trial being thousands of years, for the likely
success of a single journey's replication to exceed the combined half lives of
breakdowns and AI degeneration.

~~~
pklausler
You miss the point about replication.

------
GTP
This is an interesting idea but from what I know carrying computation in the
space just because it's really cold might not be as good as it seems: space
it's almost empty (not really a vacuum but with very few matter). This means
that in space you can't really loose heat by contact but only by emitting
infrared radiations. This means that although space is really cold an object
put in space will take some time to cool down. Correct me if I'm wrong but
given the fact above I don't see a clear advantage in using space as a
heatsink.

~~~
marcosdumay
If you do enough computation, everything starts to behave like a spatial
object. Every large enough computer is technically "on space".

------
joshuahedlund
If you're not that familiar with the Fermi Paradox I highly recommend Stephen
Webb's book _If the Universe is Teeming With Aliens... Where Is Everybody?_
[0] He covers a basic intro to the problem and then goes through FIFTY
proposed solutions in an accessible and entertaining manner. A lot of it
explains why "obvious" solutions (including the suggestion in this article and
others popping up in this thread) aren't really considered so obvious by field
experts who have thought a lot about the problem.

For example, many explanations are of the type "Well, maybe the aliens are all
doing X," but it requires _every_ independent civilization to be doing that,
with no exceptions, so that we haven't even detected _one_ variant, not even
_one_ that needed to escape its star and colonize the galaxy, which many
experts find unsatisfying. I found the book to be a fun and quick read that
touches on a lot of scientific/comsological/biological/etc concepts.

(Looks like he has a newer editing with 75 explanations...[1] I haven't read
that one.)

I see the article also mentions the simulation hypothesis. Personally, I'm
intrigued by the overlap between secular simulation hypotheses and religious
notions of the universe having a Creator.

[0][https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Teeming-Aliens-WHERE-
EVERYBO...](https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Teeming-Aliens-WHERE-
EVERYBODY/dp/0387955011/) [1][https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Teeming-Aliens-
WHERE-EVERYBO...](https://www.amazon.com/Universe-Teeming-Aliens-WHERE-
EVERYBODY/dp/3319132350)

------
ggambetta
I think it's a bit too pretentious of us as a species to speculate about the
motives and capabilities of alien civilizations who may be billions of years
ahead of us. We haven't figured out dolphins, FFS! I wouldn't be surprised if
in 100 years we look back at all this the same way we now think about the
theory of an infinite number of turtles supporting the Earth. It's all just
cutely naive speculation.

------
wazoox
There's a serious argument to be made that the famous "WOW" signal can't be
anything but an ET civilisation signal.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal)

~~~
_rpd
There's also a serious argument that it has a mundane explanation ...

[https://phys.org/news/2017-06-wow-mystery-
space.html](https://phys.org/news/2017-06-wow-mystery-space.html)

------
_mhr_
Besides the easy answer that we're looking in the wrong places by virtue of
using current human technology, my take is that an "advanced" civilization
capable of interstellar travel will have learned to be way more efficient with
energy usage. They'd have to be efficient for "advanced" energy usage to be
cheap enough at the scale of a civilization instead of rare and expensive
moonshot projects.

So they're only undetectable as a side effect of being efficient. Not because
they're hiding or have all died in a cosmic extinction.

------
visarga
> advanced civilizations just want to compute

We got the answer right here. It's much more interesting and probable to meet
AGI than aliens. Space travel is dangerous, but virtual space is just as
interesting.

~~~
camillomiller
Cool plot line for a SF novel. We advance VR so much that we end up meeting
another civilization THERE instead of outside.

~~~
robotresearcher
Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson (sequels to the more
famous Neuromancer) have this idea. AIs obtain independence from humans in
cyberspace (VR) and eventually make contact with AIs from elsewhere.

~~~
camillomiller
Cool! Will check em out

~~~
robotresearcher
Disclaimer: this stuff is mostly just hinted at, while the plot is mainly
about people working within this context. But so awesome. Blew my teenage mind
in the late 80s.

------
stablemap
Some slides I saw this morning from Sandberg and two others at this Oxford
institute:

“Dissolving the Fermi Paradox”
[http://www.jodrellbank.manchester.ac.uk/media/eps/jodrell-
ba...](http://www.jodrellbank.manchester.ac.uk/media/eps/jodrell-bank-centre-
for-astrophysics/news-and-events/2017/uksrn-slides/Anders-Sandberg---
Dissolving-Fermi-Paradox-UKSRN.pdf)

------
crimsonalucard
If we don't even know how to create life from base elements how can we even
surmise to know the probability that it will happen on it's own else where?

The fermi paradox is not really a paradox if it is based off of a probability
that we don't even know. Once we know the conditions and steps it takes to
form life then we can take a stab at estimating this probability.

Don't trust your intuition on this, while the universe is incredibly large,
nobody knows how infinitesimally small the probability of life spontaneously
arising from base elements is.... Additionally, we need to know the
probability of having this life form evolve into something that can
communicate across space.

There are things around you that have nearly zero probability of occurring
again anywhere in the universe. Unless you have a twin, the probability of
someone being born anywhere in the universe with your exact configuration of
DNA is nearly zero. It is possible that the formation of intelligent life
shares an equally small probability. Again, we don't know this probability
until someone is able to recreate it.

------
_Codemonkeyism
Isn't it better to compute now with lower efficiency than waiting
millions/billions of years doing nothing?

~~~
kieckerjan
My thought exactly. Just run the whole thing at a very low speed. One clock
tick every hundred years so to speak. This will make the whole uploaded
species live in a slower lane, but subjectively for them the rest of the
universe will seem to have sped up. Of course this has the disadvantage of
them not being able to communicate with nervous short-loved critters like us,
which also neatly explains why we don't hear or see them.

------
arkh
If there is no loophole to the speed of light limit and the Heat Death of the
Universe is not just a theory I guess most individuals in advanced
civilizations will decide to end their lives in some drug (or equivalent)
induced nirvana.

------
pseingatl
Odd that no one has mentioned Cixin Liu's Dark Forest theory as an answer to
Fermi's paradox: that the universe is a zero-sum game, and the safest reaction
to the discovery of another civilization is to annhilate it. Therefore, hiding
in the vastness of space to avoid any contact is the most prudent course.

------
prmph
Or, it could just be that there are simply no other civilizations other than
ours. I don't see why that is not an acceptable possibility

~~~
ssijak
Who said it is not acceptable. But many would just say it is more improbable
than the other option.

------
wallflower
On the Kardashev scale, we are probably only in the range of level one.

Level one civilizations can harness the entire power of a star for
communication.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale)

------
mLuby
Thought-provoking exploration on computation at the end of time
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pld8wTa16Jk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pld8wTa16Jk)

------
jlebrech
maybe we have evidence aliens have been and gone, and just used used us to
extract fuel from the planet and moved on.

~~~
chimen
I doubt that. Any advanced civilization that is capable of interstellar travel
would use highly efficient techniques to do their thing. You may say it's the
gold or platinum but we just heard of the neutron stars that collided creating
a lot of those materials in the process.

Why bother using humans to extract anything when there are other, more
efficient, ways of harvesting? That's just "ancient aliens" conspiracy
theories if you ask me.

------
ssijak
This proposal assumes that Aliens need sleep. Maybe they really work 24/7 (or
whatever are numbers on their planet)

------
agumonkey
There are others, they just made a quick U turn when they could see us afar.

------
Omnius
I couldn't read the article because of the ad with the guys tongue.

------
mar77i
...you're scaring me. Are you saying H.P. Lovecraft was right?

