codinghorror

This is based on a discussion I had in 2016 on the Boing Boing message boards: Let's talk Great Filter - general topics - Boing Boing BBS

I added

Although we often consider Pluto the end of the solar system, Voyager 1 is more than three times farther than that and yet still within the Sun’s domain. (2012)

It is the farthest spacecraft from Earth and, as of 2013, the only one in interstellar space. Nearly forty years out, the radio signals from Voyager take over 18 hours to reach Earth. Voyager’s RTG energy source will give out around 2025. Voyager, deaf, dumb, and blind, will reach the next nearby star in 40,000 more years.

If Voyager was aimed at the nearest star to us, Proxima Centauri, it would take over 73,000 years to arrive.

The most … appropriate song on the golden record attached to Voyager. If there was, or is, anything out there to hear it.

Voyager's Golden Record -Dark was the night-Blind Willie Johnson

codinghorror

Or, life will reply to us within 1500 years from now?

JimPas

A topic I’ve always found interesting. One thing I’ve observed is humans’ conceit. Since our star is at the edge of just one arm of our Milky Way galaxy - and we cannot really “observe” those planets that may be orbiting the hundreds of thousands of stars in the other arms - why would an advanced civilization want to travel to other arms without first exploring those stars/planets in their own arm first? The idea of “we are important so ETs should visit us” is contrary to the fact that first we went to the moon, then to the planets in our own solar system, and finally onward and outward into inter-stellar space - without knowing where we (both Voyagers) are actually heading. Why would we expect other lifeforms to do anything different? Could it be they could simply be exploring/visiting their own solar system and galaxy before entertaining the idea of visiting other solar systems and galaxies?

For several millennia we had the idea the Earth was the center of the solar system - everything evolved around us. As we developed as a species, we assumed we were “important” and ETs should be contacting/visiting US. Maybe they aren’t interested in us, if they even know about us in the first place. There also is the possibility that other life forms could be in the “same boat as us” - it simply takes too long to travel to other solar systems/galaxies to bother. Logic would dictate one develop one’s self first; then slowly expand outward within their own limited means.

Another concept I’ve given much thought to is even if there were advanced civilizations in more ancient galaxies, why in the world (pardon the pun) would they even consider traveling to “younger” galaxies billions of light years away?

Regardless, I do believe in our quest to explore. I am a member of the National Space Society and the Planetary Society (monthly donation for over 20 yrs). I’ve also contributed to various endeavors such as the Light Sail project. I have a 1 square cm of the sail from Light Sail 1 and have a personal message on board the craft visiting Europa. I also had my father’s name added on a gold DVD on another space craft, since he was an avid space enthusiast. His collection dates from the early years of flight (Wright Flyers aircraft (Wright Brothers)) to early rocket development to the Space Shuttle program. His collection (Attil Pasquini Collection) donated to the Empire State Aerosciences Museum (formerly known as the Schenectady Space Museum).

A little trivia on the Space Shuttle program. When I was ~16 yrs old, my father showed me 2 photographs of Space Shuttle launches and asked me if I noticed anything different between them. When I didn’t, he pointed out the main boosters on one were painted white and on the other only had a primer coat. He said an employee tasked with painting the boosters realized how much weight the white paint weighed that he was using. He suggested not painting over the primer and using that weight for additional payloads. He was awarded $14,000 for his idea, which NASA did employ.

Ad astra! (To the stars!)

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vilx_

Personally I think that it’s just a case of

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

It may be teeming with life, but detecting it (or others detecting us) is just really hard. And the speed-of-light barrier doesn’t help either.

But hey, here’s another (somewhat darker, depending on how you look at it) idea that I haven’t seen anyone talk about.

See, when you get right down to it, all that we humans do is to try and generate pleasure and avoid pain. All our struggles are really directed to this end goal. We might think that we’re trying to explore the vast mysteries of space, but really we’re just after the high that comes with a new discovery.

So what happens when we can get it directly? As our technology advances, eventually we should be able to directly interface with our minds. And then… well… here’s a concept: The Pleasure Pod.

Take one human, and discard all the unnecessary parts. Basically leave just the brain and maybe some of the spinal cord. Put it in a jar with life support and add electrodes to all the right places. Stimulate the brain to produce the maximum amount of pleasure and leave it there for eternity.

Sure, you’ll also need a flock of robots that tend to the jars and maybe relocate the whole facility to a new star system once every few billion years, but that’s also doable.

Aaand that’s where everyone is. Once the Pleasure Pod of Immortality becomes available, it kinda becomes pointless to try and do anything else.

Some people might disagree and think that such a pod would be very unpleasant or unsatisfying, but by definition it wouldn’t. Entering it would be the most awesomest thing anyone could ever do.

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technorabble

The everything gets smaller theory is interesting, but you should be confronted by an implication of this prediction. If things do indeed get smaller, a form of Moore’s law should end up applying and they also accelerate. This is in addition to any truth to other existing acceleration theories.

As things miniaturize, the travel time of any interaction should shrink, and the population should grow, and so time should seem to move faster and faster in terms of evolutionary progress. Even if there’s no hard lower wall on miniaturization, you have to wonder if the rate of acceleration from miniaturization and thus observability from scope of impact of extended evolution and the lower observability from evolution of miniaturization would be in equilibrium or be biased toward greater observability.

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vilx_

I think there’s a pretty hard wall for miniaturization. You can’t shrink elementary particles and you need at least so many of them to do useful stuff.

Rasmus_Faber-Espense

If you are interested in this topic, you might want to read about Robin Hanson’s “Grabby Aliens” theory. That is the cleanest and most plausible resolution of the Fermi Paradox I have seen yet.

eggsyntax

I think that the Fermi paradox has been convincingly explained by Sandberg et al as an artifact of point estimates; if you look at full probability distributions instead, our sadly solitary state is unsurprising:

Dissolving the Fermi Paradox

andomar1

Humans depend on the warmth of the sun, on fresh air to breath, on water to drink, on grass to grow and on insects and fish and animals to help with it all. We are a local phenomenon.

If you can convince yourself that we went to the moon you can dream about other space journeys. Just as you write, that is only after one “does away with all physical stuff”.

Michael_Borgwardt

My theory: the filter is behind us, and it’s the leap from single- to multicellular life.

Fossil evidence says that this took a whopping 3 billion years on Earth. That’s a quite significant chunk of the age of the universe.

It’s not all that unlikely that we got lucky and the mean time for this to happen is actually so long that it hasn’t happened anywhere else yet.

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JimPas

On the other hand there are billions of galaxies much older than the Milky Way, so why would it be unlikely that this hasn’t happened in any (many) of those? Because of the vast distances, the universe may be teaming with life - we just can’t see it… yet.

tjansen

Some other possibilities:

• Aliens are already here. I guess it’s established by now that UFOs do exist, albeit with an unusual interest in military. Maybe they are the aliens we’re looking for.
• Alien life forms are so different that we don’t recognize them. Maybe they are smaller, or so much bigger, or just work in ways we don’t comprehend.
• We live in a simulation, and in that case it’s likely that even if there is life in more than one solar system, all life has been seeded at the same time. Or the ‘creator’ is waiting for us to reach some development threshold before adding aliens to the game.
• Maybe every species that develops far enough to capable of interstellar travel is also so far advanced that they don’t see the point of exploring other civilizations. Maybe they have simulations that already discovered every possible species. Maybe they prefer to spend their life in a virtual world. Once you reach a certain level of knowledge, you can’t learn from other civilizations anymore.

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vilx_

Another aspect - either faster-than-light (FTL) communication is possible, or it’s not. Therefore:

• If it’s not possible (this btw also rules out FTL travel, because you could just take a thumbdrive with you), then interstellar (let alone intergalactic) communication is slow as hell, and we shouldn’t be surprised that we haven’t received any signals yet. In fact, you can’t even do anything more than broadcast “we’re here” and hope that someone gets it. We just haven’t gotten it.
• If it is possible, then it will quickly replace the older, slower methods for interstellar/intergalactic communications. And since we don’t know the trick yet, we can’t participate.

Either way, we shouldn’t expect a whole lot of interstellar chatter to be going on in the universe that we could eavesdrop on.

Thibault_ROHMER

Movie suggestion: The Thirteenth Floor

RaphaelDDL

It’s a cool take, and it’s interesting that multiple medias (tv, videogames, books, etc) have fantasized/theorized/explored multiple ways regarding that, in all 3 great filters.

Star Trek for one, goes into the “universe is full of different people” spoiler and you could say that each planet had it’s own Great Filter (#1) as each has it’s dominant civilization, and now the human space exploration is just tying these different civilizations together (being space-nosy) bringing every planet into an entire space’s great filter situation (which could be the Borg assimilating everyone - filter #3, etc).

The great filter #1 and also #3 “Almost no life makes it to this point” has been beautifully explored in the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, in the Endwalker expansion (spoilers ahead lol):

It’s pretty cool reading about these Great Filters after experiencing the game’s expansion years ago, I can totally see how the filter theory can apply to these different fantasy/fiction civilizations and how they could be used as theory examples for our IRL predictment of “where are the other civilizations”.

TeacherCoach_Live

“Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain”. What a thoughtful and relevant sentiment that guides much of human behavior. The complexities of this concept seem to be changing, regarding what constitutes pleasure and pain. Our wants, needs, and fears seem to be turning us inward, becoming more self-absorbed and more easily influenced by others. Our discomfort with ambiguity seems to be growing stronger, so having a decisive leader who is overly confident, relieves people of their responsibility to think for themselves. A timely quote from a book written quite a few years ago: “If the need for certainly becomes intemperate, undermining the ability to tolerate confusion, then one may develop a vulnerability to demagoguery and dogma, liable to cling to opinions and beliefs that may not fit the bill, but which to assuage the anxiety.” Guy Claxton.

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TeacherCoach_Live

I’m not yet able to post new conversations, so while the following doesn’t quite fit this thread it’s an expansion of this current post:

Software has some of the most profound influences on human beings of any industry. Social media algorithms impact how people vote in elections, shape our self-image, and play a role in who we relate with. Blogs allow people to socialize, apps offer recreation, and advertising collects data on human behavior. Nearly every piece of technology, person facing or not, can alter the thinking of an individual and shape the larger community. And all of it is created by coders who don’t follow any set of ethical guidelines to ensure a standard of …

In 1847 a code of ethics was established for physicians, in1953 the American Psychological Association created a code of ethics for psychologists and more recently in 2003, one was created for educators. Arguably, none of these professions has as much influence over our entire population as do coders or programmers.

“Illnesses that affect brain function — including mental health conditions, substance abuse and neurological disorders — are estimated to cost the global economy $5tn per year (roughly the size of the German economy in nominal terms today). That’s expected to rise to $16tn by 2030.”

Brain capacity is also being squeezed. “Our mental lives are more fragmented and scattered than ever before,” said Dan Nixon, an expert on the “attention economy” — which models attention as a scarce resource in high demand. “Apps, alerts and notifications are locked in a constant battle to capture and monetise our gaze.”

Data deluge is an insidious threat to our mental health. Our bandwidth is being tested, straining our capacity to process information, synthesize data, and still have time for meditative thought, responsible for creativity (problem-solving).

It is estimated the digital universe doubles in size every two years, with 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day. Much of that is available with a click, with people of all ages streaming data in all forms, all day long. Daily screen time across devices — such as computers, laptops, tablets, mobile phones, televisions and game consoles — increased from 9 hours in 2012 to 11 hours in 2019, with time spent on mobile phones increasing by roughly two hours, according to a global study.

This is simply the tip of the iceberg, which instead of melting before our eyes is gaining in size and speed. With quantum computing on the horizon, the world will soon be faced with even more complex choices testing our value system without any safety net. Do the people who are hired to do this work bear any of the responsibility for how it is used?

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JimPas

Most likely, not. Compare this with (some) AI algorithms/programs. Those responsible for creating them have no control over those who use them for unintended purposes… or altering them for specific purposes.

Should the original coders bear responsibility for how others use or make changes to their work? Oppenheimer worked on nuclear fusion (the A-bomb), got it to work, but did feel remorse after seeing the destruction of two cities. Still, he took responsibility. I’m sure if, given time, he could have worked on using nuclear fission for the power plants we have today, he would have rejoiced.

DNA editing is another area where the scientists decode & alter DNA with good intentions. Should they bare responsibility for, say a government, to use it to develop a virus to target people with a certain genetic code?

In a nut shell, the original coders who had noble intentions should not be responsible for any nefarious use of their work. BUT, those who do work with it with the intended bad purpose should definitely bear all the responsibility… and will take that with them to their graves.

Oh, and being retired, I usually spend about 16 hours a day on my laptop. I don’t watch TV, gave up my cellphone when I retired 27 years ago (I love not being hounded with phone calls when I’m out), and stopped playing with game consoles when my grandson turned 15. (He turned his attention to girls. )

With the increase in the amount of data being produced now, hopefully we’ll see the new petabit-scale data disks on the market so long as an OS can recognize that size without gagging. Talk about mental data deluge.

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TeacherCoach_Live

I’m sorry my reply was so brief when you clearly took time and thought to respond. So now that I’m a bit freer this am, I’d like to offer a more involved response. Firstly, that’s unfortunate about your grandson- I hope evolves his relationship with you where he comes to you for advice when he makes the inevitable mistakes, we all do with women :).

Regarding your response, I resonate with the analogies with other fields such as genetics and nuclear research, however, if those who employ the workers have nefarious intentions or simply capitalistic ideals, where will the checks and balances come from? If coders are simply work for hire, without a set of guidelines that help them consider the broader implications of their work, are we left with the consumer being the only monitor?

In your other examples, there are/were certainly high stakes involved, but nothing nearly as influential on our aggregate value system as software development. Where are we going to level set with values so that we don’t continue to polarize our society over which values are most important, while clever moguls benefit from our distraction?

We don’t teach values/ethics in schools, we don’t see companies with mission/vision statements created by their workforce, and we can’t rely on the average person to be well-informed to understand the inherent dangers in tech dependence. Like all inventions, including morphine which was life changing during the civil war, our indulgent tendencies well surpass moderation.

I appreciate your conversation as I know there are no clear answers to this. I’m simply fascinated with the field of programming and software development, so I’m learning as I listen.

TeacherCoach_Live

‘Conceit’ is an insightful way of describing our preoccupation with et. I do suspect we would be an entertaining civilization to study.

Great trivia about the space shuttle. What an endearing story about innovation.

woodjom

I meet your Arrival and raise you Contact…who is to say they have not, we just have not evolved enough to “hear” their contact…or we “heard” it and the Political Elite don’t want the masses to know…too many variables of both current evolution and political “Great Filters”…all variables need to be on the table and answered.

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codinghorror

Both excellent movies. I’m trying to think of the best “first alien contact” movies and there aren’t many. There is the horror movie “Life” (2017) and whoo boy that one is.. uh.. scary.

One thing I found amusing is in the series Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber (2022) Bill Gurley (played by Kyle Chandler), one of the most famous VCs out there, compares Travis to the alien entity in the movie Life. That’s.. uh.. really, really bad.

JimPas

Another ‘first contact’ movie, Earth2 Pilot: First Contact (Parts 1 & 2) | 1:35:36

Earth 2 Pilot: First Contact (Parts 1 & 2) – Epic Sci‑Fi Adventure