Random Fermi Paradox solution of the day:
Nobody goes into space and colonizes the galaxy because only Moon Nazis want to do that, and after experiencing a few dozen genocides all sapient species learn the safest thing to do when you see a Moon Nazi is to murder them immediately, it's the only way to avoid the genocides.
@cstross Okay - what about a group that takes as given that neither they nor their descendants will be alive aim to establish a foundation/group/club/whatever that can wants to *eventually* build an ark to reach Proxima Centauri at it's closest approach in about 26,000 years.
The ideals, goals, ambition, institutional methods established by the "tree planting" generations just pitching designs and funding research, etc.
Presumably non-nazis.
Basically Long Now foundation + Centauri Dreams.
@cstross And it turns the story into two engineering problems, both epoch: engineering multi-thousand year institutions based on an idea and that institution having the goal of building some mega-structure that has to be self-contained and survive a similar timescale and support a bottle civilization over a similar number of generations rivaling the time since the dawn of agriculture for both phases.
See - "moon nazis" wouldn't be into any of that or contribute thinking to it. Maybe.. ?
@stevenaleach @cstross
More importantly, if your civilization could engineer that feat of scope, energy transmission, and containment, why would anyone even get off the ship at the destination?
Or more importantly, why leave your solar system, or world at all if you have that kind of containment.
@cstross
that's not quite true. It's true of literate societies.
Whether an illiterate society can go to the stars is left as an exercise to the reader ;)
@stevenaleach
@cstross @stevenaleach
Universities hang around. Building a department which can sustain an area of study through many generations of graduate students, PhDs and professorships wouldn't be trivial.
#Anathem doesn't seem ridiculous on that.
The Long Range Foundation is even better named for this than the Long Now, albeit the latter is real.
@Photo55 @cstross @stevenaleach Even if we count from the Great Schism, the Papacy is a longer-lasting institution than any university, I think?
The Nine Houses made it to ten thousand years but it probably helps if God's still around and can send you a note if you're doing it wrong. :-)
Well, currently the Curia etc is an example of religious nature*, but perhaps not quite so continuous as people regard it, nor so devoted to a single aim, other than power, as might be needed to move anything between stars.
But yes, an old institution.
* I.E. one of the two structural approaches given above as persisting for long periods.
Vid Sup.
One could argue that fandom represents a third. (Of course, that just means we'll be stuck because we won't be able to agree on what to name the starship -- 'Enterprise', 'Millenium Falcon', 'Liberator' ...)
@skjeggtroll @cstross Aren't religions just a specific type of fandom?
Fair enough, really. 😁
The presumption that ones successors will be non-nazis has empirically / historically not fared well despite countless sincere attempts.
@cstross Then again, I don't think humans could ever colonize - but I'm horrified by the idea of *what if* there is no other life out there? What if we are "it"? Our sun's gone in a few billion years.
I'm horrified by the idea that there could be trillions of years to the heat death of the universe and nothing to see it or experience it at all.
So if we could get some microbes on probes to nearby red-dwarfs to infest any sterile warm wet rock, then all of human history was worth it.
300 million years is not the number I have heard for the sun becoming too hot for life (multicellular or otherwise).
Around the 1.5 billion years is the number I've heard (and also the number a few web searches gives me).
@cstross there is actually a sort of joke about this in the original Dyson Sphere paper.
The whole paper is tongue-in-cheek, a satire of the notion that we could find aliens by observing for radio frequencies (Dyson is making the argument that we know so little about potential alien intelligence that we might as well take all of that processing power and scan the infrared frequencies instead looking for invisible spheres around stars).
Why spheres around stars? Because clearly the only cultures to develop the technology to become space-faring would be their species version of the Nazis and would be compelled with a desire to maximize land for their progeny.
@mark @cstross The "problem" with Dyson's paper is that he tried to ridicule a perfectly reasonable scientific theory with a supposedly ridiculous scientific theory that ended up being also a perfectly reasonable scientific theory.
Both of these theories would be used for perfectly reasonable scientific experiments, which remain ongoing.
Sometimes this is how things go with science. The "big bang" theory was named by someone ridiculing the theory. Oops?
@isaackuo @cstross The problem is that both theories are equally likely.
... Dyson was trying to make the larger point of "... and that likelihood is so low we should stop wasting time on this" but the astronomy community responded with "But what if instead we consider both options?"
Honestly, it's one of my favorite self-owns in astronomy history. 😉
If memory serves, there's also a story about Einstein thinking black holes were unlikely because he'd made some solid progress on relativity with the thought-tool of "If this were possible, wouldn't we have seen it already?" Since nobody had noticed holes in space yet, he originally discounted gravitational singularities as a neat quirk of the math that was unlikely to be real.
... I think he lived long enough to bear witness to their discovery and changed his mind in light of new evidence.
(I think Dyson may also have discounted the secondary effect / "scientific head-fake": even if finding aliens is improbable, staring really hard at radio signals or infrared sources could lead to finding other cool stuff, so it's still worth doing. If the way we get there is "get folks hyped enough about ET to throw money at us," whatever works!)
Oddly enough, this is what 'primitive' tribes used to do: kill the sociopaths. We promote them to the highest positions of power.
"Random Fermi Paradox solution of the day:
"Nobody goes into space and colonizes the galaxy because only Moon Nazis want to do that, and after experiencing a few dozen genocides all sapient species learn the safest thing to do when you see a Moon Nazi is to murder them immediately, it's the only way to avoid the genocides."
@Wgere @JamesPadraicR @cstross
Blofeld in a Dalek? RUN AWAY!!!
@Wgere We've got mouse in the house, and they seem to be experts in fishing out cheese from traps without triggering them.
Could do with a little Exterminate! Exterminate!...
This is how I learn that not only did someone make a movie about Nazis living on the moon, they even made a sequel.
@cstross
Nobody goes into space and colonises their galaxy because it's an insane, incoherent goal with no possible return on the investment of energy and resources. Only civilisations infected by the Infinite Growth mind-virus pursue such goals, and their home planets … don't make it.
I sure hope our civilisation isn't throwing irrecoverable resources into a project that can definitely never pay for itself just to make the number go up for as long as possible.
@petealexharris @cstross I think that "colonizing" the galaxy is a reasonable goal, but the "problem" is that the rational way to go about it would take a lot longer than the age of the universe so far.
For the most part, interstellar probes can provide desired scientific exploration info about far away star systems, and these will not be very noticeable for us.
Space colonization makes most sense within a star system, with expansion to other star systems only making sense during close flybys.
@petealexharris @cstross So here's the thing. Star system flybys are not very common. As such, it's just plain going to take a really long time to expand throughout the whole galaxy.
So "the" solution to the Fermi paradox might simply be that the galaxy is young compared to how long it would plausibly take for our solar system to be colonized by another civilization.
@petealexharris @cstross We do lots of things that consume vast resources that bring nothing of value. I think it's a quintessential mistake to demand that human activity produce something "of value".
For example, a lot of people enjoy going on vacations to see ... I dunno penguins or Paris or something. Doesn't do a lick of good toward producing something "of value". So what? That shouldn't be the purpose of a human life.
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