Here is another attempt to crack the Fermi paradox, relying on low time preference and Knut Wicksell’s wine parable:
“While it is possible for a civilization to cool down parts of itself to any low temperature,” the authors write, that, too, requires work. So it wouldn’t make sense for a civilization looking to maximize its computational capacity to waste energy on the process. As Sandberg and Cirkovic elaborate in a blog post, it’s more likely that such artificial life would be in a protected sleep mode today, ready to wake up in colder futures.
If such aliens exist, they’re in luck. The universe appears to be cooling down on its own. Over the next trillions of years, as it continues to expand and the formation of new stars slows, the background radiation will reduce to practically zero. Under those conditions, Sandberg and Cirkovic explain, this kind of artificial life would get “tremendously more done.” Tremendous isn’t an understatement, either. The researchers calculate that by employing such a strategy, they could achieve up to 1030 times more than if done today.
In other words, now is an inefficient time for getting things done. That is from Robert Hart at Slate.
So, another person unclear on the concept of entropy as applied to cosmology, and what that ‘cooling down’ actually means.
From Merriam Webster –
2a : the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity
So another person unfamiliar with the notion of local entropy reversals (like, say, a human body) and the ease of expending waste heat into more disordered states.
The War on Entropy might be a decent way to think about Life.
The War for Entropy would be a better way to think about it..
‘so another person unfamiliar with the notion of local entropy reversals’
The point was about ‘cooling,’ specifically this – ‘ready to wake up in colder futures’
That ‘colder future’ involves, on a cosmological scale, considerably fewer opportunities for those local entropy reversals, which were considerably more abundant in the ‘hotter past.’
Apparently you missed E. T. Jaynes’ explanation. Were you squatting over and pi$$ing on an American flag at the time?
“In other words, now is an inefficient time for getting things done.”
The ultimate argument for procrastination….?
If not now, when? If not us, who?
Later. Let Brazilians do it.
In a trillion years, when the universe is much cooler. Still us, though.
This is the real reason I’m going on vacation tomorrow.
Another possible explanation is that they are so advanced that they can choose not to be perceived and currently are waiting for Earth to evolve beyond its Trumpian period.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.
The current understanding of the Universe and all our science is merely a specific model ; to beleieve it encompasses everything out there and that everything is merely only four-dimensional to all intelligent life may eventually be a frog-in-the-well scenario.
What would be the benefit for an advanced civilization who knew of us to contact us? If we were the advanced civilization, would we immediately contact less advanced civilization that we’ve detected or observed? On the contrary, maintaining contact may require high costs–think of how much of a nuisance we might be pestering our advanced counterparts. Unless they are something like intergalactic Christians who feel it’s their mission to convert everybody, or unless they are hostile and have come for our resources and to enslave us (or assimilate us a la the Borg), I think it’s likely that they know of us, but we don’t know of them.
Mostly Harmless.
If we were the advanced civilization, would we immediately contact less advanced civilization that we’ve detected or observed?
Never heard of anthropologists?
Not convincing.
They would hardly be offended by Trump, a buffoon and lapsed Democrat. Surely if these aliens are ethical they would have been offended by Hitler, Mao and Stalin.
Moreover, they may be amused by Trump, and wish to meet him.
Finally, they may be quasi Trumpian nationalist / species-ist aliens, just waiting for humans to evolve a Trump, so they have someone to do a deal with, while golfing.
+1
Indeed, like the Aliens of Independence Day 2, they admire Trump and seek his aid in making the Galaxy Great Again.
The entire Fermi paradox is based on a misapplication of probability theory.
Explain?
Yeah the framing of it as a ‘paradox’ doesn’t really make sense. The Robin Hanson approach of talking about the Great Filter is a lot more reasonable – the lack of observable aliens isn’t a paradox, it’s just an observation that needs to be explained and analyzed.
The Carter catastrophe (and its little funhouse cousin once removed – the Lindy effect) are perhaps relevant for counterpoint and context. The index of a SETI book from the 1980s would lack some very important words that a decent current SETI book would have – and really, on a very fact-free subject like this, you only need to read the indexes of a couple relevant books once every five years to keep up. “Protected sleep” is a good one for the next round of indices. …………………………By the way, Knut Wicksell is pronounced K’noot vikSELL. I had hoped for many years that it was Newt Vissle (Gussy Fink-nottle being my favorite character in the Wodehouse Universe and waistcoat/weskit being one of my favorite Cholmondely/Chumley type words), but I listened to a Swedish pronunciation and it is certainly not Newt Vissle…………………… David Cass wrote nicely on the ‘wine parable’ in 1973, so eloquently, in fact, I was tempted to look up where he learned to write (that being said, I was not tempted to read the whole article). (I had to look up ‘wine parable’ first…).
There is a lot of erudition in your post but I still can’t figure out what you are trying to say. Care to elaborate or, in this case, simplify?
This argument doesn’t make a lot of logical sense. If hypothetically, the civilizations is doing ‘x’ number of calculations in the next million years and ‘2x’ in the subsequent million years, they are doing total ‘3x’ calculations. Why wait a million years to only do ‘2x’ calculations? The limiting factor for this civilization is not the temperature but the time available in the universe to perform calculations.
What we are looking for and can’t find are Dyson sphere signatures. If an alien civilization could make a Dyson sphere then it makes no sense to just wait for a cooler universe to build them; far too much energy would simply escape unharnessed in the meantime. At the very least, one would be using the spheres to store the energy for later use, and we could see the evidence of those efforts too, which we don’t. Also, the “wait for later” approach doesn’t make sense under the game theory of a universe with potential competitors – like us – who might sacrifice future efficiency in the race to secure resources.
The authors actually acknowledge the weakness of the hypothesis, so while interesting I don’t think they are seriously presenting this as an explanation for the Fermi paradox. Another objection to this theory is that as in many explanations for the paradox it takes a possible explanation for some civilisations not being presently visible but doesn’t explain why all civilisations are required to follow this path. If just one civilisation decided to do something different then it colonises the who galaxy while the others are sleeping.
My view remains that the most likely is the paranoid one, only civilisations that are well hidden survive, as out there are monsters. The only reason we haven’t been destroyed yet is that we are not yet dangerous enough to risk the monsters being observed destroying us. But as soon as we crack AI and figure out the warp drive, be prepared for some unwelcome visitors…….
A simpler and more cheerful interpretation is that the Great Filter is behind us. Intelligent life here on Earth really is unique in an otherwise empty universe. Empty for now, our descendants will fill it up eventually. But in the meantime, we are miraculously rare – to the point where it barely seems possible – but that’s exactly what we see with our own (aided) eyes when looking out. This is the real reason Tyler Cowen should believe in God; it’s as close as anyone will ever get to providing him with empirical proof.
I don’t think that having the great filter behind us is the more simple hypothesis. It means we are poised on the cusp of a huge expansion in the number of humans who will have the resources of an entire galaxy and incredible technology. How likely is it that you are born at such a time? If of course we are not destined to fill the galaxy, but are about to be destroyed then things make more sense, we are at peak humanity right now in terms if all the humans that have loved as far as we know. So the chances are that a random human will be born at this time.
Lived not loved!
Energy is used up when you’re doing computation. When you’re doing x calculations in the next million years, that energy is permanently irrecoverable (it ends up radiated out into space), which means that you can’t use it later on to do 2x calculations.
Obviously, aestivation relies on you being very, very good at storing energy over long periods of time. Sometimes, that’s reasonable: you get a box of hydrogen and leave it somewhere, and it’s not going anywhere any time soon.
Perhaps we should worry if our descendants find convenient energy stores or “mothballed” site throughout the universe.
Related regarding Big Foot (BF). We annually hunt for deer in backwoods Adirondacks. There have been BF sightings. I told my bro if I saw one I’d shoot it. He said, “Don’t do that!. It would enrage the aliens.”
Regarding BF sightings: Is there correlation between BF sightings the numbers of teeth in the persons’ heads or the # of empty beer cans in the bed of the pick up truck?
“Regarding BF sightings: Is there correlation between BF sightings the numbers of teeth in the persons’ heads or the # of empty beer cans in the bed of the pick up truck?”
– correlation for the first, + correlation for the second. There is also a strong + correlation with the number of grandchildren you have who are also your children and BF sightings.
More common, the numbers of grandchildren that are your second cousins, once removed .. .
I think it’s funny that people who pronounces the question of the existence of God to be unanswerable and not very interesting would waste their time reading this sort of utterly ungrounded speculation.
‘this sort of utterly ungrounded speculation’
Not utterly ungrounded, at least in the last couple of decades, with the confirmation of the existence of extra-solar planets. That is the fundamental difference between science and theology, after all – one actually is based on an accumulation of facts, which are subject to examination..
It is very answerable, look all the hundreds of people who claim to have the answers. The answers just do not match.
The answers to the Fermi paradox do not match, and there are no empirical facts which would permit a choice between the proposals.
The problem of speculation on whether god exists or not is the unbounded nature of this question. For instance why one God, why not three, or ten or an infinity? Why not a god whose values chickens more than humans, or one who hates churches and people worshipping him. And so on. Nothing meaningful can be said of the god hypothesis unless you can bound the hypothesis, I.e. God must be like so for these reasons. But what kind of a God can be defined in such a way…..surely not one worthy of such a definition. If you can define gods with human definitions then they become natural phenomenon not spiritual.
In contrast the argument presented here on aliens is fully internally consistent and bounded, it even makes predictions. Clearly a superior hypothesis to the God one.
>The universe appears to be cooling down on its own.
Suck on that, Al Gore. The science is settled!
OK, I LOL’ed
Personally I think the answer is that advanced intelligent life is very rare, and very far apart, perhaps only 2-3 such civilizations in our galaxy. And that they probably have means of communication other than radio waves so we would be unlikely to detect them.
….:”maximize its computational capacity .”
But what if that is not their aim and they see that only as GIGO.
This cooling down is nonsense. If there is alien life, then it must exist on infinite or at least many points in the universe. It is improbable that all of them had decided to cool down. Why should we, for example, want to froze ourselves for a trilliion years?
To do more computations! And when computations are the thing that everything runs on (consciousness is just computations), this is really important. You could live vastly longer, and all you need to do is wait a while.
I am going to tell you Earthlings the truth since you won’t believe it anyway. Interstellar travel is very expensive, and transporting any material goods is prohibitive. However, intellectual property can be shipped at reasonable rates. Your world is owned by Hahaha corporation which produces a reality program called Life on Earth. Monitors are set up to record your actions which are very amusing. Naturally, we block any extraterrestrial contacts to keep our product pure. The crazy things you humans do are very comical making the show quite popular. We interfere rarely since you guys are plenty wacky on your own. We do regret the whole 1930’s German thing; the idea that you guys would plunge into another war so soon after the first World War was simply unforeseen.
Anyway, keep being wild and crazy!
This is what I secretly suspect.
The other idea is that this is a big simulation that we are all immortal beings that we plug into to experience life because the only way to entertain yourself when you are millions of years old is to forget everything and live another lifetime. It’s the only escape from the misery of living forever and knowing everything.
Meanwhile the other immoral aliens watch the sim while waiting for their next turn to play.
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
Soon, when the stars are right for optimum calculation speeds…
Some time ago, I realized that the cosmic microwave background at 2.7K meant the universe was too warm to allow superfluid helium to form “in the wild”. Superfluid helium shows up at temperatures below 2.17K, so the universe needs to expand and cool of a bit more before the science fiction stories involving superfluid helium life forms become even theoretically possible.
I thought the article was going to say they might be sleeping for the same reasons as cicadas, to avoid predation. Perhaps they can estimate the typical advanced-civilization-span of another world and sleep through it. I find this proposition to be more interesting and equally likely.
Perhaps the aliens are simply complacent?
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