[ExI] Fermi Paradox and Transcension

[Keith Henson]

On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 4:02 PM,  Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> On 05/09/2012 15:03, Keith Henson wrote:

snip

>> 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.

The larger context of "The Clinic Seed" assumed a 99% population
decline due to cyberspace being much more attractive than physical
space.  The remnant population has been made effectively immortal and
encouraged to have children.  However, the population is barely stable
because the attractiveness of the uploaded state drains off the
considerable majority of the children.  I consider the population
crashing to zero being more likely, but you can't write a story
without characters.

> 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.

I find it at least possible that runaway human duplication will not be
permitted.  If that does happen, it's hard to say what will happen.
Instant grinding material poverty perhaps.

> 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.

We sort of have it on an extremely small scale.  Freeman Dyson made it
clean in his analysis in Disturbing the Universe that the cost of
going into space is too high by a factor upwards of 100.  I have
figured out how to get it down by that factor, but there is remarkably
little interest.

> 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.

Perhaps, as I have suggested, speed of light is enough of a
disincentive to make the alternative of small unit sizes very
attractive.  Given that we have only recently come into fast,
worldwide communications, that has problems because some people don't
give a hoot.

> 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.

I am not sure I understand the logic involved in the last paragraph.

But where this is leading is that we may be the first.  Being killed
off by AIs seems unlikely as a reason for the Great Silence because
you then have to account for every single one of the AIs being
stay-at-homes.

An alternative is that we are in a simulation where the universe is
empty of others.

Keith