[ExI] Fermi's Paradoxical Politburo

[Eugen Leitl]

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 09:16:00PM -0700, Dan wrote:

> > 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.

My point precisely.
 
> > 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 

Except they would be a lot more diverse (speciated) and across
a much wider substrate (lightday to a lightyear), since 
ability to cross interstellar distances implies ability
to colonize the local stellar system.

> reason why they might not last longer) and there were people 
> getting around the controls or escaping all together. We'd 

There is a push towards making probes more autonmous
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/03/esa-launches-drone-app-to-crowdsource-flight-data/
which if coupled with ISRU self-rep and impossibility of
perfect control implies that probability of escapes
are pretty high.

> 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.

Right.