[ExI] Fermi question, was is a FTL drive a dream

[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 5:00 AM, Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 22 December 2011 02:13, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> If technophilic life is common, then something will keep us from growing
>> to the point of being observable from a distance.
>>
> What does prevent us?
>
> Perhaps aliens are too engaged in the bailout of their banks and in
> distributing bonuses to their financial executives to make the kind of
> real-world, large scale investment that ends up being visible from another
> solar system... :-)

Heh.

It's a really good question, one I have thought about for a number of
years.  There are many ways for a civilization to fail where everybody
dies.  I have tried to imagine ways that allow for a thriving
continuation that doesn't make a visible mark on the universe.  That
leaves out interstellar expansion.  What would keep us around our one
star forever and likewise make all the other technophilic races stay
home?

It seems possible that speeding up is such a strong economic and
survival advantage that all races upload and crank up their clock
speeds to the limit physics allows.  That's at least a million fold
faster than we currently experience.  The consequence is that the
stars recede by the same factor so subjectively a ten year journey
becomes a ten million year project.  Even with immortality that's a
long time.  (This assumes there is no way around c.)

Of course, with control over your clock rate, you can make ten years
in real time as short as you like, but going back seems out of the
question, by the time you got back, your race would have experienced
20 million years of change.

Vernor Vinge has speculated on this topic (Marooned in Realtime, A
Fire Upon the Deep) that such speedups are in some unknown sense
fatal, entities just don't last more than a few years of real time in
the transcendent state.  That would certainly account for not seeing
the effects of aliens in the universe, they blink out long before
anything visible happens.

> I was thinking that after all from outer space the Chinese Wall remains one
> of the most obvious man-made structures, and it is not really something
> that was planned and executed in the framework of contemporary
> society/economy/set of priorities... :-)

That's true.  My assumptions have been that we would see the side
effects of transportation or exploitation of stars for energy (dimming
them in visible light).

It's amusing how much speculation about the future can come from
simple observation of the universe and our own existence.  Of course
every other race facing their own version of the singularity must have
faced the same questions about their probably bleak prospects of
becoming visible in the universe.

Keith