[ExI] Fermi's Paradoxical Politburo

[Dan]

On Tuesday, March 19, 2013 8:11 AM Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org>> wrote:
>>> 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.

I believe you can local despotisms or local totalitarian states, but, as long as you're able to settle space and move across such distances, then I think it's hard to make something like a Berlin Wall to keep sentients penned in. So, I'm more skeptical of a regime spreading out. That might not mean, though, something like a libertarian space society, but maybe something more like fiefdoms with none of them being able to maintain hegemony. Still, I'm an optimist here: as long as there's an escape valve -- and, in these cases, it might prove to be a very large one -- this is likely to lead to some amelioration of command and control, if only to prevent the brightest or most creative sentients from leaving (and even returning to wreack havoc on the regim). If terrestrial totalitarian regimes give any clue, the ones that were able to prevent emigration seem to have been the most successful.

Of course, this still doesn't mean something local might not evolve on Earth that would completely suppress the escape valve and do this for a long enough time to improve command and control to pretty much lock off the world for centuries. I fear this and it's one reason to support space tourism or anything to make getting off world more efficient and less centrally controlled now -- rather than test the hypothesis here. :)

>> 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.

I think the odds of perfect control -- in the sense meant above, too -- are, if not already impossible, getting lower with advances in technology and the spread of knowledge. (It wouldn't help if the former were concentrated in political and military elites. They might just accept their limits while still investing in finding solutions (which they're doing anyway; a strong reason to defund public military and enforcement research all together) and keeping their boot planted firmly on our necks for the duration.)

>> 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.

And that's my problem with many proposed Fermi solutions: the sound good as long as no civilization disobeys their assumptions. I know I'm not alone in this and not really stating anything new here.

Regards,

Dan
My science fiction short story "Residue" is now on Amazon at:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BS3T0RM for the US
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