Konspiracy Korner: The Great Silence
.
MisterJonez has studied this shtick wayyyy more than I have. His expertise on the subject dwarfs mine.
Though he's on the other side of it, he's also got a wonderfully objective, and friendly, and nuanced tone. So we'll cheerfully transfer ownership of this discussion to him. If he's so inclined, naturally.
...
Jonez remarked that the Great Silence doesn't bother him much because radio silence is to be expected. Dr. D replied that radio waves wouldn't be the end of the discussion. Mr. Jonez, setting the hook firmly in the corner of Dr. D's maw, sat up brightly, cracked his knuckles, and started typing ...
My own initial 30-second summary of the Great Silence issue was:
.
On the radio silence -- that makes all kinds of sense, that the "shell" of radio waves might only be about 300 years "thick." Thath high-quality H2O.
My issue is, though ... supposing that radio 'bandwidth' had to converge in time, and we put "Paid" to the idea of detecting anybody else's radio transmission. (This might occur if nobody were looking for each other ...)
The Great Silence is concerned with the fact that we haven't seen evidence of ANY kind that there are advanced civilizations. For example, a civilization that was 10,000 centuries past ours could and would:
- ... Re-engineer some of its local stars to its advantage (visible to us across the galaxy)
- ... Set up a Sagan-style transmission beacon that was triggered by our own light or radio (none exist within 50 light years)
- ... release a "berserker"set of self-replicating machines (expanding exponentially) as an imperative defense system
- ... Set up some type of EMP (light) beacon system
- ... or be interested in letting us know they're here, in any way they chose ("Uniformity of Motive" problem)
- ... Colonize, organize, and fill up the Galaxy to (benignly) take advantage of all resources in it
- ... re-engineer the COSMOS, if they're really 1 billion years ahead of us :- )
- ... etc etc etc
Instead, we look and listen out into the galaxy and there's nuttin'. Absolutely nuttin'. And we can see all the way across the whole thing.*
- See more at: http://seattlesportsinsider.com/comment/157204#comment-157204
....
Whereupon MisterJonez went into a hypnotic trance, channeling the spirit of Carl Sagan:
.
Good reading material there. I'm just going to go free-flow on your points, because you did a great job of outlining so many of the same things I've wondered. Don't mind the incoherency if you can help it ;-) And, to be clear, I'm not arguing with you here; I'm trying to keep from tripping all over my own shoes out on the dance floor :-)
To your #1 point: this is a significant issue, but I think it might be less of a 'problem' than we are led to believe. I love stories which involve star lifting or other forms of stellar engineering which, if carried out, would actually extend the lifespan of the universe that we see around us. By draining away their mass and converting stars to red dwarfs (the primary form of star lifting I've seen discussed), the ongoing fusion process at their cores is balanced to the point where they could sustain their red dwarf phase out to 100 billion (with a B) years or more*. There would be some telltale signs of this behavior going on, if it was taking place, but those signs would currently only be visible to us in relatively close stars, if I understand the limits of modern telescopy half as well as I think I do (which is to say, not very well but well enough that I can't be off by more than an order or two of magnitude, which wouldn't really change the equation that much).
*incidentally, red dwarf stars are really, really hard to detect via our modern telescopes. this would seem to negate *some* of the concern that we can't currently see evidence of stellar engineering because, for the most part, it would result in stars being shrunk to red dwarfs, which are...you know...hard to see ;-) So, while it *could* be occurring, by its very nature it would be difficult to detect unless it was relatively early in the process, and relatively close by, in cosmological terms.
Point 2 is trickier, because it does imply motive to the intelligence, or at least it implies some degree of commonality with our current attitudes/behaviors. I'm not sure I can really tackle that one, but I will say that it would seem extremely odd, logically, for a super-advanced civilization to NOT set up a galaxy-wide comm. network, if only for the purpose of keeping tabs on developments in the region. However...
Point 3 is where it starts getting juicy, especially when viewed in the same light as Point 2. Some would naturally view such a set of berserker/conformity probes as a pro-active defense system, just as you suggest. But others would likely be more cautious, and that caution would almost certainly stem from the fact that intelligence (at least as far as we can tell) is unpredictable to a large degree (you frequently reference super chess programs that behave in utterly inexplicable ways that even panels of grand masters do not understand). If you build the berserker probes, what's to stop them from turning on you and giving YOU a hard time? Even assuming they aren't a threat to wipe your civilization out, due to some kill switch you have hidden under the driver's seat, is the risk worth the reward? By unleashing something like that on the universe, you'd essentially be declaring war on everything, including creation itself, and that type of behavior strikes me as unlikely - even for an artificial intelligence. It's self-serving without an end goal in mind, and I doubt that AI's - which are almost certainly inevitable on our own Life Tree - would undertake such a grand exercise simply for the purpose of restructuring reality.
Point 4, again, assumes a couple of things that give me pause, but it's interesting to think about, for sure. The first bump in the road, for me, is that we would be able to observe such a system; who's to say they aren't communicating via highly-focused particle beams that aren't broadcast omnidirectionally? I mean, if conserving resources is important - and I think any civilization which was as advanced, or more advanced, than we are would think it was - you wouldn't really want to be wasting all the energy required to send a readable signal out in *every* direction when you could do it via what amounts to a high-powered, ultra-advanced, whisker laser network. But even assuming they built said network; again, the fact that we can't *see* it would seem to suggest that we aren't meant to. Keeping something like that secret, until a young civilization has reached a certain level of advancement, seems consistent with how *we* behave with regards to younger people or less-developed societies when it comes to game-changing technology (no 9mm Beretta's for eight year olds - and no nukes for you, Iran!).
Point 5 you address well enough that I will just agree that Uniformity of Motive is an issue, but just for fun I'll take a swing at it. Let's say they actually are interested in contacting us...the first question we would need to answer is: why? Easiest way to do that, given our limited perspective, is by assuming their role to the best of our ability and thinking about it from what we think is their position. It boils down to two possibilities: either they want to cooperate with us, or they want to compete with us. If cooperation, it might reasonably be for a United Federation of Planets style, galactic community induction. It could be. I mean that seriously - it really could be. That would actually explain a lot of the our inability to find evidence of advanced intelligence in our own galaxy. The community passes tech laws which ensure that all members operate above the 'radio bubble' detection level where we're currently at, which makes their actions undetectable by lesser species (like Earthling humans in 2015) and this keeps the playing field level for those species to go through their own developmental process. Obviously, this is the Gene Roddenberry version, but like all great sci-fi minds his ideas were rooted in reasonable logic (even if his tech was mostly hand-waving). If they were interested in contacting us for another reason, it would almost certainly be for competition or, more succinctly: to wipe us out. You're either going to cooperate, or you're going to compete; there is no middle ground as far as we can tell when it comes to life's behavior on any scale.
Point 6 is actually easier than most people (I'm assuming this would not include you, but I'll spew my thoughts here, anyway ;-) ) might think to debunk, at least when dealing with parochial concerns like living space, food production, energy harnessing/utilization, etc.. Most of the problems we stress over, here on Earth, are pretty small beans in the grand scheme of things. I can't find the image, but there is a beautiful picture of an artist's interpretation of how a massive hab ring (or it might have been a bubble) could be made by stripping the Earth from the inside out and maximizing the mineral content to create a hab ring that could comfortably house either hundreds of trillions, or quadrillions, of people (I forget the number, but it was absurd). So, to actually take advantage of *all* the resources in the galaxy seems, at best, a megalomaniacal plot and, at worst, an actual attempt to pretty much destroy everything as we know it. If the concern of a highly-advanced species was essentially just to persist and grow at an 'organic' (I hate that term, but I'm tired and having difficulty coming up with a better substitute) rate, there would be essentially no reason to leave their own solar system, physically, for several thousand years once the first energy hurdle (fusion**) is well-and-truly cleared. So, again, colonizing the galaxy seems like it wouldn't be that high on a hyper-advanced civilization's agenda. Especially if the light barrier can't functionally be broken.
**The amount of water on the Earth would power humanity's aggressive growth curve for, essentially, ever (or at least long enough for us to figure out a more efficient energy generation method, like micro black holes, which might take us a few tens of thousand years but we'll get there if we survive that long). Once we've got fusion power, the whole ballgame changes into something that nobody, not even those with once-in-a-generation brilliance, can imagine. Nobody could have predicted what the internet would do to humanity within three points of the compass, and fusion will be an even bigger deal in the long run.
Point 7 is taken right on the jaw, however, and I don't have much I can say on that particular subject. If you've got a civilization which, at year one of our hypothetical calendar, was where we are today and had a billion years to progress...first off, I have no idea what the agenda would be for such a life form. Bacteria haven't even been around on Earth for HALF a billion years; what in the world would a billion-years-on evolved human think was important? The only answer which is consistent with there being advanced intelligence out there for that long, which doesn't result in such large-scale engineering, is that they don't want to. I'm pretty good at empathy and understanding other people's positions (a pretty key attribute for a D&D GM/fiction author, I think) but I wouldn't even *think* about trying to climb inside that creature's mind. Even if their raw intellect was still on a scale we could comprehend to some significant degree...I just...no. I can't do it.
.....
Let me be clear: I'm much closer to what seems to be your position, regarding advanced intelligence, than I am to several (but not all!) prominent physicists, who seem absolutely convinced that such is hanging out just around the corner. The above was just me trying not to fall hopelessly behind in the conversation :-) In my mind, there's no way to rationally declare that the Great Silence isn't a whale of an issue for several important existential, philosophical, and scientific questions.
A random thought: sanctity of life does seem to be inextricably linked, as a core value, to any nonviolent advanced intelligence existing nearby which hasn't come to wipe us out (which, I assume, hasn't yet happened...). This, to me, is why Gene Roddenberry's utopian (or dystopian, depending on your perspective) future can't just be dismissed out of hand. It's entirely possible that any species which is a hair too violent would turn its own lights out before it could join any kind of galactic community. So a 'waiting period' of sorts would seem to be warranted on the part of such an advanced civilization/society before making contact with the beings. I've got in mind a story where that's exactly what happens: first contact doesn't take place until *after* the radio bubble goes quiet for a period of time, then the ambassadors come in and answer the question: did they blow themselves up, or did they pass that particular hurdle and prove they're ready to join the greater community in some capacity?
Either way, I just spent an hour or more on this ridiculous post. Sorry for wasting y'all's time...
- See more at: http://seattlesportsinsider.com/comment/157211#comment-157211
.
Ridiculous post? If anybody ridiculed that, they'd be commenting on themselves only. Like not voting Randy Johnson into the Hall :- )
That's one of the great things about the Think Tank, is that there is always a legit specialist who can bring his studies to bear.
Warmly,
Jeff