[ExI] Fermi Paradox and Transcension

[Anders Sandberg]

On 05/09/2012 11:19, BillK wrote:
> IEET have a long article suggesting that the future of all
> civilisations is to 'transcend' and live inside black hole domains.

While I hope this is possible and maybe true, I think there is a deep 
problem with the hypothesis: it assumes a very strong convergence to 
this lifestyle. It must be so good that no alien Amish or explorers get 
left behind to make the universe different. Can you imagine any cultural 
or technological innovation that would suck in 100% of humans?

My and Stuart Armstrong's work on Dyson-powered intergalactic 
colonisation has convinced me that the Fermi question is between a 
million and a billion times tougher than commonly assumed: we need to 
consider aliens not just from our galaxy but from a sizeable fraction of 
all visible galaxies as potential past colonizers here. That means that 
any cultural convergence better be a million or a billion times stronger 
than the level we would think necessary in order to keep the Milky Way 
colonisation-free. I don't think we have any plausible mechanism for that.

The alternatives is of course that aliens are between a million or a 
billion times rarer than we would normally think, that the risk of 
existential risk is between a million or a billion times worse, that 
they are here but manages to maintain silence to a very high degree, or 
that the technology ceiling is much lower than we normally assume on 
this list.

The silence in the sky is surprisingly talkative, but it is unclear what 
it is saying.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University