Exploring the Fermi Paradox

The Brief Window: When the Accident is Inevitable

The previous post is where this conversation got started. In that entry, hopefully I convinced you that we should have seen evidence of mega structures or past/present visitations of Von Neumann probes. In this post, we take these ideas further by considering a kind of accident which could result in the destruction of all habitats in the galaxy, and possibly beyond.

I also mentioned some of the consequences of exponential growth. After about 40 iterations of making copies of themselves, there could be trillions of Von Neumann probes in our solar system. Whatever entity is first to put one up will be at a huge strategic advantage for exploiting the solar system and beyond. I expect there to be a significant arms race to build the smartest, most-capable and fastest-reproducing space robots.

In such an arms race, it’s not inconceivable that something could go wrong and one team of robots (or perhaps just a rogue robot) will go on to replicate uncontrollably and unstoppably. Such a swarm of robots could then spread to nearby stars, consuming everything in an attempt to out-compete long-forgotten competitors. Along the way it could alter itself, evolve, and the universe would end up filled with evolving intelligent mechanical life. It would be utterly inhospitable to biological life. The habitable zone (for mechanical life) would become quite a large section of the nearby universe, instead of exceedingly rare pockets of life.

This can be thought of as an accident that would render life like we know it impossible. So, therefore, it clearly hasn’t happened in our neighborhood of the universe.

This is somewhat similar to the grey goo doomsday scenario, but it doesn’t have to involve nano technology. It also applies to a large neighborhood of our universe.

What it Might Mean

Consider that we might get this scenario rolling within a century – at least some of the infrastructure will be in place. We could make it happen fairly soon, but it hasn’t happened yet in the lifetime of the nearby universe.

What should we make of this?

To me, it means that

In the nearby universe, if you sum up the total amount of time that all of the advanced civilizations have had, it’s not that significant.

By, not that significant, I would think that there’s good reason to think that the total amount of time other civilizations in the nearby universe have spent at a level more advanced than we will be in a century is… I’m not sure. The devil will be in the details. But, I highly doubt that it’s possible the total amount of time could be in the range of even several thousand years.

This is a fairly reasonable conclusion from thinking about the creation of mechanical life as an inevitable accident.

This line of thinking is called the Brief Window Hypothesis.

Applying the KTS

In an earlier post, I developed a Knowledge Tier System. In my opinion, it should be placed as a Tier 3 anomaly (the absence of unstoppable and unmissable space robots – Von Neumann probes). It has less warrant than the traditional non-catastrophic Fermi Paradox, because it supposes that an out-of-control catastrophe is inevitable – and likely on a very brief timescale, when considered cosmologically.

Given what we understand about life and real-world game theory, I feel that the onus is on those who think such technology could be contained and controlled essentially indefinitely. Such thinking seems absurd to me, given our real-world experience with issues like

• nuclear arms control
• AI safety
• climate change

To conclude that an accident isn’t inevitable, you have to find a mechanism that explains why every type of technologically-advanced civilization that developed before us was able to avoid this accident.

This explanation is a high merit Tier 4 hypothesis. I’ll discuss this in more detail later in this entry.

Implications and Other Possibilities

I’ve already mentioned that, since we’re here as biological life, such an accident hasn’t happened yet – despite the fact that we will probably be capable of producing such an accident within a century. To me, this means that

1. Civilizations at the level of technology we should be at in 100 years have been incredibly rare.
2. This implies that there are significant filters behind us.
3. There is still a universe-altering filter ahead of us.
4. biological life is doomed, but the universe will soon become filled beyond our wildest dreams with artificial life.
5. Thus, the reason we haven’t detected ETs, is that we’re about to wreck the universe, and anyone else like us who came before us would have done the same.

We’re all alone – basically. There’s probably lots of other life forms out there, but they’re separated by great distances and all of them are more primitive than we are. In fact, given the exponential rate of scientific growth, we should expect that none of them are anywhere close to us. We might even be alone in our ability to communicate using sophisticated grammar.

The Merit of these Arguments

Focusing on an accident was not how the Fermi Paradox was originally posed, and I’m not the first person to make similar modifications to the paradox. To me, it felt necessary, because people have tried to argue that a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox is that intelligent life is out there, but we can’t detect it.

To me, this feels like cheating! Intelligent life will undoubtedly be diverse, but what does it mean to not be recognizable? Does it use technology? If not, how intelligent is it? If it does, and that technology interacts with the environment, why wouldn’t we be able to detect at least some of that interaction?

Thinking in terms of intelligent agents interacting imperfectly with their environment is the only realistic approach. This, as far as we know, exposes such a technological species to the risk of a runaway accident. Such an accident, would be unmistakable, which eliminates the possibility that we wouldn’t notice them.

In order to be perfectly fair to my own Knowledge Tier System, I would have to say that this is not a Tier 3 anomaly, because it argues for an as-of-yet unobserved phenomenon, the “inevitability of AI-driven mechanical life”. This is not an established scientific fact, even though I find it personally quite compelling. In fact, it seems to me that if this ever rose to the level of a Tier 2 or 1 scientific fact, it would then be the accepted scientific resolution to the Fermi Paradox. But maybe some would disagree. I feel that it’s really unlikely that a mechanical life catastrophe would be inevitable and we would also see another technological species anywhere in our region of the universe.

So, ultimately, the merit depends on how inevitable you think mechanical life is.

How Inevitable is Mechanical Life?

I was going to title this section, “The Inevitability of Mechanical Life”, but you might disagree. However, I feel like if you asked the question in the right (yet equivalent) way, pretty much every mainstream thinker would agree that it’s going to happen – provided civilization is able to advance for several more decades. Something like, do you really think we’ll never make something that is

1. mechanical
2. has some autonomy (has some AI)
3. can replicate

or that we won’t at least have a swarm of robots in space capable of self-replicating.

To put it even more succinctly: who really thinks we’re going to be able to control AI forever? I’m not saying it’s going to escape soon – like within decades, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets away from under human control within a few centuries. I can’t see it not happening within a few millennias, right? That’s practically no time at all in cosmological terms.

Other Possibilities

There are still other possibilities. I’m not the first to think of these ideas, Nick Bostrom and others (I think) were some of the first. They’ve pointed out that there could still be significant filters ahead of us yet, before the mechanical-life-that-destroys-all-habitats scenario plays out. For example, it could be that we’re much more likely to simply destroy ourselves first, before creating autonomous Von Neumann swarms. They’ve gone on to point out that if we discover signs of ET intelligence, that means there’s at least one filter in-between where we are and the Von Neumann swarm doomsday scenario. It means we don’t want to find evidence of ETs, because we don’t want evidence that that filter is anywhere ahead of the Von Neumann swarm scenario.

At least, this is my understanding of some of the claims in this area. I’m trying to make my own sense of things. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot out there that takes into account much of what we know. Because when you don’t take something into account, you can end up with a thought experiment later on that invalidates that scenario.

This brings me to claims of the paranormal.

Shifting Focus: Other Local T3 Anomalies

The cosmological contradiction of the Great Silence is huge, but it’s not the only persistent failure of the T1/T2 system to explain real-world observations. What about phenomena closer to home?

UAPs / UFOs and other Fringe Claims

I haven’t looked into this much, but I do know that every year many people claim to have been abducted by something. Many of these claims belong to genres and the existence of those genres of claims as somehow real is a legitimate Tier 3 anomaly.

Why do so many people have abduction experiences? They have the experience, whether it happened in reality or not. And, apparently, there are a lot of themes to these experiences.

This can be interpreted in multiple ways. For one, it could mean that there’s an underlying physical mechanism we have yet to discover. However, I don’t think we’ve discovered that mechanism yet.

In the case of raw UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), there’s even more merit, because the cases can involve up to thousands of witnesses, and can include multiple independent sensors. Those cases are rare, but they do occur!

What frustrates me about much of the discussion (as far as I can tell, but it does seem to be getting better) is that there aren’t many people who seem to acknowledge that the sheer volume of the claims and the quality of a few of those claims makes many of the skeptical criticisms or explanations/debunkings seem silly. Some of these claims really do seem to resist explanations that would satisfy a pure naturalist. They really warrant consideration.

Resolving the Contradiction

As far as I’m concerned, a lot of what’s left is fairly low-merit. However, there are still several possibilities. I feel like a lot of them involve a simulation somehow. I’m not the first to come to that conclusion, for various reasons.

I’m also fairly comfortable living with the apparent contradiction. I don’t feel an urgency to debunk UAPs, but I also strongly doubt they could possibly originate from within the universe, or at least within our dimensions of it – however that might be possible. At the point of considering other dimensions, I feel like we might at well be talking about being effectively outside our universe. I’m not a cosmologist, though, so there may be some subtle distinctions going on there.

To be sure, though, some of them very likely could be highly-advanced human technology. I think most people expect that some of them are. On the other hand, though, other cases seem to defy what we think is possible physically, so those are the ones that really stand out.

Other Paranormal Claims

Other so-called “woo” areas seem to behave similarly to the UAP / abduction phenomena. There are just an awful lot of anecdotes out there and the vast majority seem to be really bogus claims. There are, however, the occasional “quality” cases, if that’s the correct term.

In every area from Big foot to poltergeists, you can find, it seems, people claiming to have had encounters with them who really didn’t want to. Those people always strike me as the most credible. However, even that can be faked.

I feel like they ought not to be dismissed, but also that it would be nice if they were investigated in good faith, but by people who aren’t necessarily true believers. Give it a fair shot, but also don’t hype up every claim so it sounds incredible.

In that regard, I feel that applying the Knowledge Tier System’s Tier 3 classification helps. There are, however, other systems out there that also try to accommodate fringe claims that haven’t been definitively ruled out by well-established science and those that are simply weird and may sound almost magical.

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