[ExI] Fermi's Paradoxical Politburo

[Dan]

On Friday, March 15, 2013 2:23 PM Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
>> On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 01:51:08PM -0400, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>>> On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 5:13 PM, Dan <dan_ust at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>  But look at the Amish! Are there more or less of
>>> them now than a hundred years ago?
>> 
>> ### Massively more. Population in 1920 about 5,000, population
>> today about 250,000.
>
> Amish show some selective adoption of technology,

True, but I see no reason why ETs might be similarly selective. You know, some sect might take space tech, but stop at having AI or nanotech. The issue here, for me, is less that most wouldn't -- even as most of humanity isn't Amish or Luddite -- but that only a few of them would likely overrun the galaxy in short order.

> and of course not everybody returns back into the fold after
> rumpschpringe, though most do.

I've heard 90% return, but this was in a documentary -- not a vetted source. I think the most here is much more than 51%, so maybe 90% is correct. If there's anything to what I'm saying, one can imagine ETs visiting the homeworld or the home dyson to soak in the new tech for a while with many returning to the frontier. At least, it might make a good story. :)

> No population of agents can be uniform, and no policy
> can be 100% enforced. As such sustained containment is
> arbitrarily improbable, especially across population of
> populations with no common point of origin, across deep
> time.

Exactly! The best examples we have on Earth are totalitarian states like the Soviet Union under Stalin. Even they were rather shortlived (though there seems no principled reason why they might not last longer) and there were people getting around the controls or escaping all together. We'd have to postulate that every last civilization develops total states to such a degree that there's no escape or rule-breakers or that so many have that it might as well be all.

Dan
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