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.
Can you even form a civilization without being an pleasure seeking organism? Chemicals that produce pleasure or pain are fundamental to how life motivates individual creatures into doing basically anything.
If an alien body doesn’t produce the good/bad chemicals then what motivates it to do anything?
How about a civilization that doesn’t have chemistry at all? Set off a von Neumann machine to colonize the universe and biology is irrelevant after that.
You ignored the other “maybes” I threw out there, BTW. It only takes one of those to work in one situation and the Fermi Paradox is off to the races.
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.
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.
Can you even form a civilization without being an pleasure seeking organism? Chemicals that produce pleasure or pain are fundamental to how life motivates individual creatures into doing basically anything.
If an alien body doesn’t produce the good/bad chemicals then what motivates it to do anything?
How about a civilization that doesn’t have chemistry at all? Set off a von Neumann machine to colonize the universe and biology is irrelevant after that.
You ignored the other “maybes” I threw out there, BTW. It only takes one of those to work in one situation and the Fermi Paradox is off to the races.
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.
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.
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.