[ExI] Fermi Paradox and Transcension

[Anders Sandberg]

On 05/09/2012 15:03, Keith Henson wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 5:00 AM,  Anders Sandberg<anders at aleph.se>  wrote:
>
>> 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?
> Cell phones have come fairly close.  Even the Amish use them.  Can you
> think of a culture that has rejected them?

I know people who reject them. And I am pretty confident some monastic 
orders refuse them.

If there is something 99% of people select, then the important question 
is what the remaining 1% do. If one of their possible actions is to 
reproduce very fast or expand across the universe it doesn't matter that 
their offspring also tend to select the something in 99 cases out of 100.

At present, if there existed something like that mankind would all end 
up using it since it is not possible to reproduce or flee fast enough. 
So if the super-attractor is very easy to do and happens before 
spaceflight, then it could explain the Fermi question. Except that we 
don't seem to have anything like it, cellphones nonwithstanding, and we 
could (if we were slightly more collectively rational) have spaceflight 
by now. The super-attractor could perhaps also work in a solar system 
wide civilization since interstellar travel is relatively tough, but now 
the attractor state needs to be far more strongly attractive than the 
mere planet-scale attractor since it is harder to reign in widely spread 
habitats. For interstellar civilisations the attractor must be able to 
happen locally regardless of communications limits, and must on average 
make a colony produce less than one offspring colonies.

The higher the technological level required to trigger the attractor, 
the less plausible it looks that it could successfully attract 
*everybody* and not just the majority.


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