I only read the abstract and I still have no clue what these funny duddies are talking about, but I thought the general idea was neat
interesting idea that connects with Matt's ideas expressed in cushvlogs about communism being the only way to reach homeostasis with our environment
This is a really wordy way to say "The Fermi Paradox is capitalism".
"Aliens don't exist because there is no alterative to capitalism's cycle of infinite growth and economic crisis. No, I haven't ever heard the term "planned economy" why do you ask?"
They're using fancy words that amount to capitalist realism + analogies around climate change and other forms of overextractive collapse.
I find these kinds of ideas very boring because they amount to a breathtaking lack of imagination. Really, they're saying, "what if every other form of potential intelligent life is just like us?", right down to the use of cities on planets and an infinite growth model for a global society. Cool, great, that's what sci-fi is useful for, you can critique our society from within another one. But as a group trying to be very serious and use the big words...
The Fermi Paradox is best answered by noting that its numbers are pulled out of some old white dudes' asses and so its conclusions mean nothing. If anything, the difference between reality and the numbers game just puts a minimum bound on how wrong the numbers are.
The Fermi Paradox is best answered by noting that its numbers are pulled out of some old white dudes’ asses and so its conclusions mean nothing.
Just like orthodox bourgeois economics.
I agree, the issue with speculating about aliens in any way is that our imagination is hilariously limited. We are the only intelligent species we know of and we live in a very specific environment and have very specific needs, which has shaped the way we think and our way of life in very specific ways.
Everything we can imagine is just a remix of things we have seen before, and if there are aliens out there, it's highly likely they will be nothing like anything we know. Literally inconceivable to us at this point. Not just visually, but also in how they think and act.
I've yet to be convinced that "Why can't we hear the aliens" is at all a sensible question. Beyond our nearest star systems even detonating nuclear warheads in morse code in high Earth orbit will get drowned out by cosmic noise pretty quickly. Space is just too damn big and empty.
I'm more interested in the question "what would the aliens need to do, and how far can they be, so we can detect their signal at all with our current instruments". Any good sources on this? I found this article, which is interesting, but very pointedly treats the observable radius of a signal emitter as a free parameter, essentially ignoring it as a limitation.
This is a good answer to the Fermi paradox, not least of which because it doesn’t assume that “civilization” will necessarily either grow or collapse. Infinite exponential growth is impossible, but we’ve had a functioning ecology on earth for a billion+ years so there must be some way for life to reach a level of dynamic homeostasis over long periods of time.
It’s also a good explanation for why there were so many one-planet/one-system high tech civilizations in Star Trek, but only a handful of major interstellar colonial civilizations. The Prime Directive tells us that every civilization that was formally visited by the various Enterprises would be warp-capable, but if every civilization either grew exponentially or collapsed then these one-off civilizations make no sense.
If, however, a lot of civilizations get to a point of stability within their home system, and therefore have no need to expand beyond that, then it makes sense that there would be a whole bunch of little semi-utopian societies just quietly doing their thing, only reaching out when they’re facing some sort of major existential threat, or out of pure curiosity.
That also explains the function of the Federation pretty tidily. If there are a whole bunch of planets that have reached global communism, or something like it, then it makes sense to have an interstellar union that those planets can join for the sake of mutual protection, mutual aid, cultural and scientific exchange, etc. Basically civilization insurance.
The Fermi paradox asks: in a universe that seems amenable to abiogenesis and the evolution of life leading to technological civilizations, why haven't we seen definitive evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations? We contend that this question presents itself as a ‘paradox’ because there is an implicit assumption that the trajectory of progress can be extrapolated from the past, i.e. that the future is a linear extension of past and current trends. Specifically, civilizations are projected to attain greater energy harnessing capabilities and greater knowledge of the universe until they spread in an unbounded colonialist manner across the galaxy.
The Kardashev scale is one example of this mode of thinking. This measure of the ‘advancedness’ of civilizations is based on the concept of energy expansions: a Type I civilization uses all of the energy available at the planetary scale; a Type II civilization uses all of the energy available at the planetary system scale and a Type III civilization uses all of the energy available at the galactic scale. It has been argued that once a Type II civilization becomes interstellar, it should spread across the galaxy in a relatively short amount of time. Hence, the lack of evidence of extraterrestrial visitors is widely considered to be consistent with the belief that a Type III civilization does not currently exist in the Milky Way. Additionally, extragalactic observations suggest that Type III civilizations are rare , although this absence may stem from an inability to observe in the appropriate way.
Two important aspects of biology are missing from Kardashev-like frameworks: (i) evolution is not always gradual and linear, but is impacted by major transitions and ‘punctuated equilibria’ and (ii) the dynamics of city-like living systems in which information flows and energy flows result in superlinear scaling and singularity crises.
Perhaps Type III civilizations on the Kardashev scale are in an unreachable part of biotechnological state space because most civilizations face burnout at the planetary/sub-planetary scale. When burnout approaches, if Δtwindow < 0, the civilization will necessarily collapse or regress until it iterates into a new cycle. If Δtwindow > 0, the civilization has a chance to consciously transcend into prioritizing homeostasis; otherwise, it will collapse or regress. Hence, there may be very few or no plausible trajectories through biotechnological state space that connect humanity's present state and the region occupied by hypothetical Type III civilizations
the dynamics of city-like living systems in which information flows and energy flows result in superlinear scaling and singularity crises
What
Also, you know, "using all the energy available at the planetary level" sounds like it could describe a disaster scenario. I wonder to what extent the Kardashev scale caused all these civ-style tech bro brainworms about colonizing space and everyone becoming a star citizen, etc.
Brainworms caused just by the scale existing and defining an ontology for all of human civilization.
they're saying that in modern cities under capitalism, increasing the size of the city results in an increasingly large increase in the amount of resources necessary to keep it going, and thus, an increasingly common number of technological breakthroughs that must occur to support the increases in resource usage. which is dumb af because they're assuming capitalism and growth are just a thing a normal civilization would do, which others have pointed out is very silly.
this is a good one but my favorite is "lightspeed is too slow"
OR MAYBE THERE'S A SMALL GAP BETWEEN THE INVENTION OF THE RADIO AND THE REALIZATION THAT SENDING OUT RADIO SIGNALS HAS THE BENEFIT OF "WOW NEATO AN ALIEN REPLIED" AND THE DRAWBACK OF "DAMN SOMEONE SENT A SUPERWEAPON AND GENOCIDED US ALL"
That's how Bayesianism works for techbros: they metagame the odds that they themselves made up to the point that laughably unlikely escapist power fantasies for themselves are presented as inevitable.
