[ExI] Where are they? was Re: 2^57885161-1

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 03:45:27AM -0800, The Avantguardian wrote:

> Perhaps your new law of physics should be that "cultures of an intelligent species 

Intelligent species are a subset of all expansive species.

> cannot exist without inherent politics."  

Politics is a very small subset of all interactions in a postecosystem.

> The dissidents you speak of are probably universally supressed by politics in all examples to date. Poor Keith can't get SBSP past the international politics of "scary lasers in space" and the TSA wants to grope me so why would you assume an uber-advanced species would be collectively any less oppressive towards any individual who espoused anything but status quo lotuses and circuses? Intelligence is at least as rare in the universe at large as it is on earth. That is to say very and thus unlikely to get its way in a democracy. 

My aquarium is not a democracy.
  
> > The cost of building one Von Neumann probe would be
> >trivial for an advanced civilization, it would be like one of us purchasing a candy bar.
>  
> The monetary and energetic cost would be miniscule, but the aesthetic and genetic cost would be quite high. 

Bzzt, parse error.

> Like a candy bar that caused genocide by turning your and everybody's elses atoms into more candy bars.

Instructions unclear, converted universe to candy bars.
Then ated them.
 
> >And even if the probe and its many many children moved no faster than our Voyager 1 (very unlikely) it could reach every star in the milky way in just 50 million years and the galaxy would be unrecognizable. To a 13.7 billion year old universe 50 million years is just a blink of an eye.
> 
> I am glad none of the handful of civilized worlds likely in our galaxy has gone that route . . . yet.
>  
> -------------
>  
> >Or maybe the answer to the Fermi Paradox is the simplest and most obvious, we're the first, after all somebody has to be.
>  
> Ahh but in celebration of his birthday, I will invoke the Copernican principle and say that we are unlikely to be the first. 

It's a statement we can feel good about, but unfortunately it's
not supported by any data.

> I would say that there is about a 2/3 prior chance that we are one standard 
> deviation above or below the mean in age or advancement for civilizations. 

Bzzt, no data.

> Also keep in mind that only civilizations indigenous to any of the 14600 
> stars within our radio light-cone have any chance of detecting us and vice versa. 

If we don't collape there will be measurable stellar dimming
in about a century scale, if not earlier.

> The universe is vast and you have sampled only a small speck of it. 
> It would be unwise to extrapolate that ridiculous sample to the universe at large.  

Expansive life is impossible to miss across GLYr distances, unless
observability is censored by relativistic expansion + anthropic principle.
What we see is exactly what we can expect to see.