- cross-posted to:
- space@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- space@lemmy.ml
You must log in or # to comment.
I see Someone played dead space 3 recently
Isn’t this similar to the “Great Filter” theory?
I’m guessing you didn’t read the article, but the answer to your question is “sort of” if the “filter” in question is civilization itself.
I did read the article. Thus my question.
IIRC the Great Filter theory suggests that intelligent civilizations may self-destruct before reaching a stage where they can communicate across interstellar distances. Possible filters might be nuclear war or environmental collapse, technological stagnation, societal collapse, etc.
This is in essence what the article aligns with. Thus my question. Isn’t the bottom line not just the “Great Filter” theory (which isn’t explicitly mentioned in the article)?
Sort of. The article is making the argument that on a cosmic timescale, one won’t even need a “great filter” to explain Fermi’s paradox. Any civilization with even a minuscule chance of eradicating itself will eventually do so given billions of years.
The way I understand this is that the Great Filter isn’t just about time, as this new theory is and you explained well. It’s about a specific barrier that most civilizations fail to pass.
Going further, none of this explains, of course, some glaring issues (with both theories). Even if civilizations die out eventually, that doesn’t explain why we don’t see any signs of them:
- No ruins, probes, artifacts, or lingering tech
- No Dyson spheres or interstellar beacons
- No signs of past galactic empires
If billions of civilizations once existed, some should have left detectable traces, unless we really aren’t smart enough (yet?) to actually detect these signs. The “they all died eventually” argument doesn’t account for this.
Also, this new theory (and the Great Filter, really), assumes all civilisations have the same vulnerabilities. What if:
- Some develop robust safeguards?
- Some spread across multiple star systems, as another poster mentioned here?
- Some transcend biological limitations?
If even a few civilizations overcome existential risks, they could persist. Maybe the rare earth theory holds more water. This all is a topic on its own.
- No ruins, probes, artifacts, or lingering tech
- No Dyson spheres or interstellar beacons
- No signs of past galactic empires
Would we really be able to see any of these if they weren’t right in the immediate neighborhood?
- Some transcend biological limitations?
By inventing self-replicating machines, perhaps? :(
I’ve seen this sort of “solution” to the Fermi Paradox proposed a lot, and I have yet to ever see it satisfactorily answer the obvious and necessary followup: “How?” Once a technological species has become spaceborne and distributed itself over multiple solar systems, what actual mechanism would be capable of wiping it all out?
The paper this article links to just assumes a “probability of self-annihilation” without actually addressing the “how” beyond some vague “maybe war or climate change or something” (note that these things would be completely meaningless to a civilization capable of colonizing other solar systems). They might as well have substituted a “probability of being eaten by grues” in the equation instead.
I’ve always liked the idea that eventually every civilization just invents vats of dopamine you float in blissed out and that’s where society just ends.
The problem with the entire class of “maybe every civilization just does X” solutions to the Fermi Paradox is, what about the subset that just doesn’t do that?
You’re basically proposing a powerful selective pressure against susceptibility to inventing vats of dopamine. Whatever alien species that ends up with some subset of its members that don’t do that will be the ones that inherit the universe. Maybe they’re a species that just doesn’t have a dopamine-equivalent. Maybe they do, but they have some religious or cultural prohibition against it. There’s all sorts of possibilities and for this to be a valid Fermi Paradox solution you need to rule out all of them.
The paper this article links to just assumes a “probability of self-annihilation” without actually addressing the “how”
Is that really such a strange perspective? Surely you must accept the idea that even without knowing every possible mechanism of death, the probability of death for every lifeform we have ever encountered approaches 100% over time.
We’re not talking about individual lifeforms, though. We’re talking about technological species and ecospheres spread across multiple independent habitats. And none of those that we know about have ever gone extinct before. A mechanism is required before this is a complete theory, let alone a plausible one.
You are suggesting that until we have evidence of a technological civilization that has gone extinct, we should be working under the assumption that they persist indefinitely?
No. I’m saying that you can’t use evidence of some particular thing happening to support a theory that requires something completely unrelated to happen. It’s simply not a valid argument.
I’m simply saying that if someone wants to propose that the solution to the Fermi Paradox is that interstellar civilizations quickly perish and never rise again, it kind of behooves them to include a mechanism for how those civilizations perish. We’ve never seen it happen so there’s nothing that can be assumed here. Step two needs to be made explicit.
Ah I see what you mean now. You’re right, but that’s not really what’s being stated in the article. Boiled down, they’re essentially making the argument that if you accept that a civilization can eradicate itself (via nuclear war, climate change, plague, a generation of ipad kids, etc etc), even if you calculate that chance of eradication to be infinitesimally small, then given cosmic time scales it becomes a near inevitability.
they’re essentially making the argument that if you accept that a civilization can eradicate itself
That’s exactly the “step two” that I’m challenging, though. That’s my entire point. I don’t accept that civilizations like these can eradicate themselves without some further work to establish that.
via nuclear war, climate change, plague, a generation of ipad kids, etc etc
None of those are plausible ways to reliably wipe out an interstellar-capable civilization. Especially bearing in mind that “wiping out” in the Fermi Paradox context requires that they be wiped out such that they can never recover. Full blown permanent and total extinction. Something that merely knocks them back to the stone age is no biggie on the sort of timescales the Fermi Paradox operates on.
I’m pointing out that the “answer to the Fermi Paradox” that these researchers are presenting is incomplete in a very fundamental way. It’s like proposing an explanation for why the Sahara Desert is dry by calculating how frequently you’d need flying saucers to come and steal all the water from it, but not doing any work to establish that there are flying saucers coming to steal all the water. An interesting exercise in playing with probability equations, perhaps, but not a useful one.
Relevant, and super awesome comic.
love Bad Space!
Oh damn, I’ve seen short bits of this comic on reddit, I didn’t know they had a web site!
