This essay is analogous to a mathematical proof that begins "Assume A and not A" and concludes: "and therefore P≠NP." It's not that I disagree with Miller's conclusion, it's just his premise is a contradiction, and thus capable of proving anything.
First, the contradiction: Fermi's paradox says that intelligent species are common, and that some fraction of intelligent species will engage in interstellar colonization. By some simple reasoning, this implies that the galaxy filled up with intelligent life a billion years ago. But the skies look empty.
Using Fermi's paradox, we could "prove" that the universe is filled with hostile, silent aliens that exterminate any species that discovers radio (as in Saberhagen's "Berserker" novels), or that interstellar colonization is impossible, or that intelligence is a self-defeating adaptation and we're doomed to wipe ourselves out. This makes for fun science fiction, but you can't use it to prove anything.
The conclusion is a fun bit of Puritan moralizing (entertainment bad, real life good). And because we want to agree with the conclusion, we're tempted to overlook the sloppy reasoning.
(And I'd love to say something about Miller's use of evolutionary psychology to present plausible hypotheses without supporting evidence, but that's a whole other can of worms.)
I really did not expect this much resistance on HN to a fairly classical solution to the fermi paradox. Mostly it's spun in a more positive "retreat into virtual reality" type situation but it's the same thing.
We have no idea how humans will react to the ability to sate every desire and wish artifically. It's not just hyper-porn and the xbox 720, this would apply to the desire for exploration, solving hard problems, building well functioning societies, raising successful offspring, etc.
There also has to be something hilariously ironic about all of us on hacker news insisting that people in the future will reject fulfilling technological wastes of time in favour of productive activities that benefit themselves and humanity. At this very moment a large percentage of the brightest minds in the world are working on getting people to click on internet ads and building products that monetize well but are honestly a net loss to humankind.
While a subset of humanity definitely can become addicted to such 'artificial' stimuli -- porn, videogames, webcam, television, books, drugs, etc -- most of us do not.
Most people who play videogames still go to work and make things. Most people who consume porn still seek out physical mates. Most people who have done opium still seek out life and pleasures beyond the artificial orgasmic haze of the high. Most people who smoke pot still go about life like the rest of us. And more to the point: most people who interact with computers do not do so the way that HN readers do.
Have we learned nothing from the rise of "social" software? Most people are not like us. They value technology based on how useful it is in helping them perform tasks in the real world. Most of them don't sit on Facebook all day and artificially interact. They coordinate parties and playdates, buy concert tickets and share the results of their real world interactions. Hell, a big chunk of the latest batch of popular social apps are predicated on using technology to record and socially-score real-world activities (the various photo sharing services, travel services, shop review services, location check-in services, etc).
Any argument predicated on using the behavior of addicts as predictive of the behavior of the wider public is fundamentally flawed. And particularly so, when it comes to assumptions that the wider public will ever use computers in ways that seem inevitable and obvious to geeks.
I too am surprised. In my mind, it has long been inevitable that - at the very least - the wealthy population of the planet will retreat into a virtual world, ala "The Matrix".
It's not just the benefits of instant, unlimited sensory gratification (which are IMMENSE - real-world physical attraction and location no longer becomes an issue for finding partners, you can enjoy any activity at any time which in the past could cost you enormously in terms of money and/or risk: in a virtual world there's no spread of diseases if you're not in physical contact with people, no risk of death driving @ 140mph, etc. which also means a reduction in health costs, etc.).
It's simply far more efficient in many ways: why physically travel to work when you can have virtual meetings, offices, etc.? You could attend university anywhere in the world regardless of your location. Doctors could operate remotely where it's physically cheaper to live. Sitting at home all day (or in a Matrix farm) also means using less energy so you eat the bare minimum, don't need to own a car, don't need a big house with a garden, etc. On a larger scale, how useful will e.g. war become as the demand for physical resources falls? The efficiencies are mind-blowing; it is globalization of both personal and economic activities and human resource allocation without the physical constraints.
Ironically enough, in the same vein as your comment, I would expect people on HN are more likely to be fans of such an extreme form of telecommuting, telelearning, etc.
Not that I'm not suggesting all of this is good or healthy. Who knows what the psychological or physical effects of such a lifestyle will be.
Speculating further: At that point, why bother exploring the universe? Or more interesting: to what extent would wealth exist? It seems people would only need enough wealth to maintain their physical bodies and access to the planetary supercomputer. Accumulating more wealth could prove very difficult since classical economics falls apart in a virtual world where supply can become potentially unlimited over time. Would it be possible to accumulate sufficient "real" wealth to construct devices capable of finding and communicating with aliens, and/or visiting them? Would industries capable of building such devices even exist after everybody moves into the matrix after a few thousand years? All in all, once civilization reaches a particular level of technological development, it seems like there's a very small window where anybody will see benefit to OR have the resources to communicate with aliens.
>> At this very moment a large percentage of the brightest minds in the world are working on getting people to click on internet ads and building products that monetize well but are honestly a net loss to humankind.
Strictly speaking, it's a very small percentage of the world's brightest minds. To imply otherwise reflects a stunning amount of hubris.
If we do some very rough back of the envelope calculations :
There are roughly 1.3 million software developers in the U.S, out of a population of ~306m (0.4%).
Extrapolating that against the global population of ~7 billion, we can round up to ~30 million developers worldwide.
If we define "brightest minds" as those holding IQ scores in the 99th percentile (135+), there are 70 million people with genius level intellect.
While I don't have numbers measuring the IQ distribution across developers, I think we can safely assume that no more than 10% (3m) have an IQ in the top 1%.
Therefore, no more than 4.2% of the world's brightest minds are in fact developing software of any kind. The number can be further pared down to reflect the number of "geniuses" working on generating ad-clicks.
But by having people click on those ads, the companies that are advertising (which could be and are companies actively engaged in "physical" products) are acquiring paying customers and thus have greater ability to fund their products.
SpaceX, Boeing, GM, and Victoria Secret need revenue sources to create their 'non-virtual-reality' products, and marketing/advertising creates a revenue source. If they had a net loss from advertising they simply wouldn't do it.
I'm kind of peeved at how (in talking about how the human economy has become so focused on entertainment as opposed to "real" economic activity) the author cites "IBM, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Matsushita, Samsung, Micron Technology, Intel, Hitachi, Toshiba and Fujitsu" as companies that are pushing out "fake", "virtual" goods that do not contribute to human material success, and then lists Victoria's Secret as a company that makes "real things". (Victoria's Secret being, by the way a prime example of a company that bases its success on manipulating evolved behavioral mechanisms. I don't think this is wrong in the way the author does, but this does betray a certain internal inconsistency.)
The antipathy to computing is incomprehensible - I would say that the ability to have fast and high-bandwidth communications, computerized organization (calendaring, e-mail storage, etc.) and the like is more likely to contribute to human growth to the stars than (in the author's example) zippers.
and you forgot to mention most important, computer simulations witch are virtual but contributes to real. if you are going to send colonization probe to few ly distant planet you are have to have some badass simulation first.
There are so, so many things wrong with this line of arguing presented as The Solution that I'll just present my two biggest. First, as a solution to the Fermi paradox this must mean that ALL the millions of species with quintillions of individuals MUST always prefer to retreat into virtual reality AND completely forget about reality.
Most putative solutions to the Fermi paradox have this problem. It isn't enough to create a way to eliminate 99.999% of millions of civilizations, because the result is still that the galaxy would have been colonized before we achieved sentience. Self-loathing arguments are a particularly popular one, but even striking a fashionable "humans suck" pose (and make no mistake that this is a fashionable signal to send) proves nothing else about the other beings that could exist.
Secondly, it must mean that all species that so retreat must so thoroughly retreat that they completely forget about the outside universe and have no desires to increase their computational power for any reason, ever. This is a much higher level of tech than we have now, and none of the quintillions-is-probably-a-conservative-estimate must ever decide that hey, that juicy looking star system over there could be converted to another hunk of VR simulation and if I send over the hardware to do it, I can completely own the resulting VR installation.
(Personally I favor the other end of the argument; life evolves easily, assuming Earth-like conditions, and the Rare Earth hypothesis doesn't require very much hoop-jumping, new physics, or bizarre probability arguments, it just requires serious consideration of the possibility that organic life-as-we-more-or-less know it may really be the only solution, and may really not be able to arise in very many places. If you dig into the prevailing wisdom against that idea, you'll find it's more philosophically sourced than scientifically sourced, there really are a lot of good reasons to think there aren't that many available chemical regimes life could work in, and in general it's probably the most scientifically-sound Fermi paradox answer. It's just not philosophically fashionable.)
Let's imagine there are billions of planets out there (a true Sagan-esque billions) which have spawned intelligences that have achieved interstellar travel - ie. they have the ability to actively seek out and communicate with others of similar ability. Perhaps like the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek, except many, many of these, separated from others by various degrees of intelligence or ability.
Let's imagine there are far more planets like ours that have life - let's throw intelligence out, because that is defined by some relative standard - which has not yet reached that capability. Why would we be interesting in the scope of these far more advanced extraterrestrial societies?
Perhaps they don't reach out because it would be as fruitless as us trying to communicate with ants. Perhaps they don't care to study us because we seem about as interesting as primordial soup (ie. a nuclear holocaust might be a trait of that). Perhaps intelligences like ours are well understood, well classified in the genus of the universe, and we are about as ordinary as a barnacle on the hull of a tug boat.
Perhaps life is common (happened about a billion years ago here), but intelligent life is not (about 100,000 years ago, give or take).
Perhaps without FTL drive, it takes what explorers there might be a long time between (expensive!) visits, so sightings are rare. Without FTL, and without some kind of cold-sleep, a journey to the nearest stars pretty much takes a lifetime. A few would go, but not many.
It's too late (bedtime) for me to slap "Drake's equation" type numbers on this, but hopefully you get the idea. Maybe we've not seen anybody because they only visit any given planet every million years or so, and "they" equals 2 or 3 species local enough to even bother with that paltry schedule.
I'm not saying there is anybody out there, just that lacking pure freaking magic technology, it's a hell of a trip to make if they were. OTOH, if there is an outpost 100 light-years away, expect a visit in another 100 to 1000 years???
Primordial soup is interesting. If we had any of it to study, we'd have hundreds of postdocs studying it right now, as we have lots of labs studying all sorts of things that are not obviously useful.
Any species that didn't have intellectual curiosity about things that aren't obvious useful would probably never make it off its home planet. A lot of the math and science that underlies stuff we use every day didn't seem useful when it was developed - see, for example, the theory of computation, worked out when there were no computers, and without which there probably still wouldn't be any computers.
True, but if these super-advanced aliens are populating many planets, then we'd presumably be able to detect them somehow, irrespective of whether they care about us.
It may be electromagnetic leakage or Dyson spheres or any of a number of other signs of artifice.
Almost everything good and bad that humans have done is due to the drive of a SMALL number of (or single) individuals (American Decl. of Independence, Soviet revolution, Indian freedom struggle, race to colonize the world, WW2, 9/11, Iraq invasion).
That is why it doesn't matter if 99.999% of the world is pre-occupied with one mindvirus or other. It's the 1-in-100k person who really takes humanity to the next level of greatness/depravity.
There will always be ambitious people for whom this world will be too small: they will colonize the next planet.
The whole "great men made history" meme is kind of discredited. It's true to a point, and it's certainly a lot more interesting (therefore easy to remember) if you say that WWII was Hitler vs. Churchill and Stalin, but it's not entirely correct.
In science, it might just be 1% of the top 1% who make the big breakthroughs - how many times did one guy make more than one really huge breakthrough? I can think of one big fuzzy-haired counterexample.
Everybody talks about bandwidth as if that's some terribly important metric, but the real metric is brainwidth. Vendors are fighting tooth and nail for time on your brain.
And they're doing very well. It's very rare to pick up a device that does just one thing -- the days of the wristwatch and one-function cell-phone are gone. Now everything you touch is competing to take up all your braindwidth. Information is not passive any more; it's sticky. As a consumer you are not a entity who receives services from a webapp. You are a target for absorption by way of total immersion. Potential vendors can either get on board with your addiction or lose out to others who will. This is why we buy Facebook, Google, and game ads. Your brainwidth is already being sucked up. As vendors we have to go where our potential markets already are.
If you want to talk about extrapolating history, our books are full of useful examples. Time and time again people could not make the changes necessary for society to evolve so they packed up their bags and moved. You can't move any more, and lots of immersive content providers want to take your frustration and turn it into your being plugged in all day.
Who wants to go live on the moon? We can do a lot more exciting things in our own custom-designed universe. A couple hundred more years of this and we won't be going anywhere besides LEO or doing much of anything except patting ourselves on the back and telling ourselves how many important things we have right here.
And they're doing very well. It's very rare to pick up a device that does just one thing -- the days of the wristwatch and one-function cell-phone are gone. Now everything you touch is competing to take up all your braindwidth. Information is not passive any more; it's sticky. As a consumer you are not a entity who receives services from a webapp.
This removes human agency, and it's only true if we, as individuals, want it to be true. (I'm 28, wear a watch, and use a paper notebook (http://jseliger.com/2011/05/11/eight-years-of-writing-and-th...) in addition to having an iPhone; but the iPhone only takes up as much mental bandwidth as I let it).
My brain is not a passive entity that is "being sucked up." People either let themselves be sucked up, or they don't.
It's a fair guess that humanity will become extinct because of problems in the narcissistic sector. It comes down to Baudrillard's "classical analysis of Disneyland" and the fact that Jon Stewart and Glenn Beck are more emotionally satisfying than actual political commentators. Put the postmodern factors together and it gets hard to believe that humans will find political solutions to the problems of the 21st century.
As for why we haven't met aliens, I think there are two more fundamental causes.
(1) In 2011 we know that many stars have planets. This should be no big surprise based on considerations of angular momentum. The trouble is that Jupiter-sized planets tend to get sucked into the accretion disks of their stars, and in the process they tend to destroy Earth-sized planets that exist in the habitable zone. Planetary systems are common, but habitable terrestrial planets are rare.
(2) Interstellar travel and communication is highly difficult. It's possible that some civilization will manage an interstellar travel event among billions of civilizations and billions of years. However, the percolation threshold for a self-sustaining and growing interstellar civilization will never be reached. (Civilizations won't establish an outpost around a secondary star and create additional colonies)
A few years ago I did an analysis of interstellar war. The obvious mode of attack is to launch a deadly bombardment against a planet before any possible counterattack. One clear conclusion was that if you launched a missile that traveled at 10% of the speed of light, it wouldn't matter much if that missile were tipped with a hydrogen bomb or not -- you just can't get enough energy from either nuclear fusion or fission to propel a starship at a reasonable speed. (If you go slow, a 1000-year generation starship would need tons of antimatter simply to keep warm.) Note that interstellar hydrogen would impact such a starship at high velocities harder than radiation from a nuclear reactor.
The corollary is that neither fusion energy nor fission energy is sufficient for interstellar propulsion
The physicist David Deutsch makes the point that there is no real way to distinguish a consistent, convincing virtual reality from reality itself.
Therefore, there is no real moral difference between richly populating such virtual worlds (once we can construct them--we can't quite, yet) and populating actual other planets. Nick Bostrom would say that even using the word "actual" is probably wrong, since we're likely living in a simulation already.
There's a simpler (maybe too obvious) answer to the Fermi Paradox: the window of time in which it seems worthwhile to communicate with aliens or to settle the galaxy is exceedingly brief.
Interesting point. Based on what the author of this post is saying I wonder if the average human were given the option to enter a virtual reality where they could set the parameters to whatever they want would people know the difference or even care to find out? If you could have any beautiful woman you want, a great body, and great financials who would want to leave that fantasy?
Finding earth (or another earth-like planet with people) would be like finding a particular particle of sand on a beach.
The universe is mind numbingly big - try to imagine how big and then quadruple that size and you are still wrong.
Just the observable universe is nearly 50 BILLION lightyears in each direction (there could be more and it's expanding).
(remember the deficit/debt demonstrations of "million" vs "billion")
We are trying to observe the equal of the other side of the world with optical and radio telescopes but essentially the best observations we can make out are just at the range of the doorframe to our home.
What if there is other human-like life but it's a million lightyears away - it's all but useless to us to even find out, they are long gone by the time their light and radiowaves ever get to us (and visa-versa). Now realize the nearest other galaxies are SEVERAL million lightyears away.
I think it is because the Drake equation[1] over-estimates the chances of intelligent life forming.
A common average result for the Drake equation is 10,000 habitable planets capable of sending signals in our universe. But if you look at the equation and estimates they are a bit optimistic.
If you take fℓ from the equation, I don't think simply being of the right composition in the habitable zone is enough. The Earth formed life because of the moon, because we had been shiften off our axis which formed seasons, because we were made of enough iron to form a magnetic field, and we just happen to form a moon which protected the Earth from space debris and gave us tides (in short, the moon and magnetic field are essential to life on Earth, as well as the composition of the planet).
That is a lot of 'ifs' to add to the equation, which brings the chances of a planet even in the habitable zone having the same life-bearing characteristics as earth much, much lower. Even with thousands of planets in the habitable zone the chances of finding one that has a magnetic field, the right temperature, a moon, etc. are very very slim and when multiplied back into the Drake equation brings the result back to lower than 1 - meaning we are a complete fluke.
There is also the time portion of the equation. The Earth is 4.6B years old, and we have been capable of sending signals for only 100 years of that time. Even if our civilization survives for another 10,000 years it is still 10,000 years divided into 4.6B years - so even with the complete fluke of an Earth-like planet being created in a habitable zone takes place, we are still 1 in 460,000 chance of being around at the same time. If Drake gives us 10,000 possible habitable planets with life, the 1 in 460,000 factor of time brings it back to a lot less than 1 again.
I believe that Keppler will continue finding planets in the habitable zone, but they will look more like Mars and Venus than anything like Earth.
I find it interesting that the Drake equation, created to show that there must be other intelligent life, can today be used to show that we are very unique when it is adapted with what we know today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#The_equation
The problem with the Drake equation is the huge uncertainty in the factors. I propose instead that we get someone at Microsoft to estimate the number of piano movers in the universe and estimate from there.
Kind of a bummer. I was expecting the article to be about the density of the universe and the speed of light and whatnot. Instead we've got alien porn to blame. Which, if I know anything about aliens, should be reaching us in the next decade or so.
...edit...
oooo, and I just thought of somethng. Or, they got so advanced that they realized they probably shouldn't alert the rest of the damn galaxy to their presence. Given how the human mind seems to be so accepting of things it doesn't understand.
My theory is that we haven't met aliens yet because the aliens have been to earth sereptitiously, have taken some DNA samples, and have decided there's nothing to be gained from making contact with us. They've told everyone else in the universe that the planet is hostile and not particularly technologically developed. They have also noted that it is not a threat just as long as they don't get advanced space travel technology. The best way to keep them from getting advanced space travel technology is to not communicate with them and thus leave them to their own devices. Additionally, based on the alien's models of planetary development, they have come to the conclusion that our civilization will not develop decent space travel before it collapses due to natural resource depletion.
The universe is a big place. There are probably trillions of habitable planets. We're just not that special. Maybe one day, if we somehow become "worth it", they'll stop by.
That's true. I mean, what if our 5 senses just can't pick up on other, radically different types of life. And whatever life forms may have visited us may not have the senses to pick up that we're here.
Has anyone thought about this...astronauts release their waste into space. There's bacteria that gets frozen almost as soon as it leaves the ship/space station right? Couldn't it stay preserved until it lands on a distant planet that hasn't formed an atmosphere and be the seeds for life on infant planets? I'm no physicist (or scientist, period), but it's just a question that's been bugging me for a while.
Evolution, by definition, doesn't anticipate anything. It's disappointing to see a university professor writing on evolution who seemingly doesn't even understand the evolutionary process.
I'm sorry but this is a way of speaking that doesn't necessarily imply he believes in an evolution capable of cognition. It's a short hand for saying "humans evolved in situations so unlike the situation they have today, that the traits they evolved are no longer best-suited for survival in today's world"
Honestly if the human race discovered a less evolved colony on the moon, I wouldn't want to know what we would end up doing to them. Most likely Nike would figure out a way to put them in cages and force them to make shoes every day. I think the reason why we fear aliens is because its a reflection of what we know we would likely end up doing to a lesser lifeform.
Oddly enough, I think its an optimistic outcome if we play video games and never meet aliens in that if they function like us, it will be either us exploiting them or them exploiting us unless we amazingly are right on par with each other. Sorry to be so pessimistic, its just that we have consistently failed pretty hard as a race in how we treat other creatures and the environment.
I think the most likely answer is either:
a) Same reason we don't SMS other species on earth - we're first, and if anyone else catches up it'll be a long time from now
b) We can't begin to conceive of the sort of technological advances achieved by other lifeforms. The fermi paradox rests on probabilities accumulated over billions of years, but ignores how briefly human intelligence has existed - the written word is only a few thousand years old. If your species advances to the point of being able comprehend and control all of reality, is there much point in having endlessly bigger LCDs powered by your awesome discworld, built by your giant starfleet? Is our faith in the inevitability of endless growth and expansion not itself a sort of primitive cargo cult?
If the entire process of going from advanced social being with primitive tools and language to a post-physical singularity takes on average 50,000 years, the drake equation need changing
Good point, something that I have not contemplated before. It makes sense: If we evolve to the point where we can control reality, why would we be concerned with expanding and travelling the universe?
It is almost like saying: "You can do anything and become what you want to become." What do you choose?
Half way through the article I was in a bit of agreement with the writer about how our need for immediate gratification is so easily satisfied by the virtual supplements we get everyday and how it weighs us down overall as a society of humans; but all of a sudden he moves to assumes that people who are classified as religious fundamentalists, for some reason, seem to have figured it all out! Clearly the author is contradicting himself here. It is very unlikely (I would say impossible, but there's always an outlier somewhere) that someone who happens to be a religious fundamentalist would also not have delusions of "fitness-faking". What a terrible end to an article that could have been such an awesome topic of discussion.
Not credible, because if even a few people stay away from futuristic, all consuming super-porn, and can convince their kids to do the same, then those people will come to predominate, and the super-porn becomes irrelevant. There are already people who would consciously eschew any form of entertainment that would prevent reproduction - the Amish would ban it within their communities for sure.
On the other hand, if just one person with control of an adequate supply of nuclear weapons (or other super-weapons, possibly including ones that haven't been imagined yet) decides to wipe out humanity, he stands a good chance of succeeding. This seems much more plausible than mass suicide via entertainment.
But is it likely that there would be enough people (with never a dip large enough to spell disaster) who live on the razor thin edge of rejecting the technology that leads to dead ends hundreds of years later but still push forward the technology necessary for advancement? Is there a stable organization that can do this?
I agree that violent distruction is more likely now, but I think that that is probably an easier problem to solve than this one.
[+] [-] ekidd|14 years ago|reply
First, the contradiction: Fermi's paradox says that intelligent species are common, and that some fraction of intelligent species will engage in interstellar colonization. By some simple reasoning, this implies that the galaxy filled up with intelligent life a billion years ago. But the skies look empty.
Using Fermi's paradox, we could "prove" that the universe is filled with hostile, silent aliens that exterminate any species that discovers radio (as in Saberhagen's "Berserker" novels), or that interstellar colonization is impossible, or that intelligence is a self-defeating adaptation and we're doomed to wipe ourselves out. This makes for fun science fiction, but you can't use it to prove anything.
The conclusion is a fun bit of Puritan moralizing (entertainment bad, real life good). And because we want to agree with the conclusion, we're tempted to overlook the sloppy reasoning.
(And I'd love to say something about Miller's use of evolutionary psychology to present plausible hypotheses without supporting evidence, but that's a whole other can of worms.)
[+] [-] freshhawk|14 years ago|reply
We have no idea how humans will react to the ability to sate every desire and wish artifically. It's not just hyper-porn and the xbox 720, this would apply to the desire for exploration, solving hard problems, building well functioning societies, raising successful offspring, etc.
There also has to be something hilariously ironic about all of us on hacker news insisting that people in the future will reject fulfilling technological wastes of time in favour of productive activities that benefit themselves and humanity. At this very moment a large percentage of the brightest minds in the world are working on getting people to click on internet ads and building products that monetize well but are honestly a net loss to humankind.
[+] [-] roc|14 years ago|reply
Most people who play videogames still go to work and make things. Most people who consume porn still seek out physical mates. Most people who have done opium still seek out life and pleasures beyond the artificial orgasmic haze of the high. Most people who smoke pot still go about life like the rest of us. And more to the point: most people who interact with computers do not do so the way that HN readers do.
Have we learned nothing from the rise of "social" software? Most people are not like us. They value technology based on how useful it is in helping them perform tasks in the real world. Most of them don't sit on Facebook all day and artificially interact. They coordinate parties and playdates, buy concert tickets and share the results of their real world interactions. Hell, a big chunk of the latest batch of popular social apps are predicated on using technology to record and socially-score real-world activities (the various photo sharing services, travel services, shop review services, location check-in services, etc).
Any argument predicated on using the behavior of addicts as predictive of the behavior of the wider public is fundamentally flawed. And particularly so, when it comes to assumptions that the wider public will ever use computers in ways that seem inevitable and obvious to geeks.
[+] [-] lusr|14 years ago|reply
It's not just the benefits of instant, unlimited sensory gratification (which are IMMENSE - real-world physical attraction and location no longer becomes an issue for finding partners, you can enjoy any activity at any time which in the past could cost you enormously in terms of money and/or risk: in a virtual world there's no spread of diseases if you're not in physical contact with people, no risk of death driving @ 140mph, etc. which also means a reduction in health costs, etc.).
It's simply far more efficient in many ways: why physically travel to work when you can have virtual meetings, offices, etc.? You could attend university anywhere in the world regardless of your location. Doctors could operate remotely where it's physically cheaper to live. Sitting at home all day (or in a Matrix farm) also means using less energy so you eat the bare minimum, don't need to own a car, don't need a big house with a garden, etc. On a larger scale, how useful will e.g. war become as the demand for physical resources falls? The efficiencies are mind-blowing; it is globalization of both personal and economic activities and human resource allocation without the physical constraints.
Ironically enough, in the same vein as your comment, I would expect people on HN are more likely to be fans of such an extreme form of telecommuting, telelearning, etc.
Not that I'm not suggesting all of this is good or healthy. Who knows what the psychological or physical effects of such a lifestyle will be.
Speculating further: At that point, why bother exploring the universe? Or more interesting: to what extent would wealth exist? It seems people would only need enough wealth to maintain their physical bodies and access to the planetary supercomputer. Accumulating more wealth could prove very difficult since classical economics falls apart in a virtual world where supply can become potentially unlimited over time. Would it be possible to accumulate sufficient "real" wealth to construct devices capable of finding and communicating with aliens, and/or visiting them? Would industries capable of building such devices even exist after everybody moves into the matrix after a few thousand years? All in all, once civilization reaches a particular level of technological development, it seems like there's a very small window where anybody will see benefit to OR have the resources to communicate with aliens.
[+] [-] doktrin|14 years ago|reply
Strictly speaking, it's a very small percentage of the world's brightest minds. To imply otherwise reflects a stunning amount of hubris.
If we do some very rough back of the envelope calculations :
There are roughly 1.3 million software developers in the U.S, out of a population of ~306m (0.4%).
Extrapolating that against the global population of ~7 billion, we can round up to ~30 million developers worldwide.
If we define "brightest minds" as those holding IQ scores in the 99th percentile (135+), there are 70 million people with genius level intellect.
While I don't have numbers measuring the IQ distribution across developers, I think we can safely assume that no more than 10% (3m) have an IQ in the top 1%.
Therefore, no more than 4.2% of the world's brightest minds are in fact developing software of any kind. The number can be further pared down to reflect the number of "geniuses" working on generating ad-clicks.
[+] [-] balbeit|14 years ago|reply
SpaceX, Boeing, GM, and Victoria Secret need revenue sources to create their 'non-virtual-reality' products, and marketing/advertising creates a revenue source. If they had a net loss from advertising they simply wouldn't do it.
[+] [-] azernik|14 years ago|reply
The antipathy to computing is incomprehensible - I would say that the ability to have fast and high-bandwidth communications, computerized organization (calendaring, e-mail storage, etc.) and the like is more likely to contribute to human growth to the stars than (in the author's example) zippers.
[+] [-] majmun|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerf|14 years ago|reply
Most putative solutions to the Fermi paradox have this problem. It isn't enough to create a way to eliminate 99.999% of millions of civilizations, because the result is still that the galaxy would have been colonized before we achieved sentience. Self-loathing arguments are a particularly popular one, but even striking a fashionable "humans suck" pose (and make no mistake that this is a fashionable signal to send) proves nothing else about the other beings that could exist.
Secondly, it must mean that all species that so retreat must so thoroughly retreat that they completely forget about the outside universe and have no desires to increase their computational power for any reason, ever. This is a much higher level of tech than we have now, and none of the quintillions-is-probably-a-conservative-estimate must ever decide that hey, that juicy looking star system over there could be converted to another hunk of VR simulation and if I send over the hardware to do it, I can completely own the resulting VR installation.
(Personally I favor the other end of the argument; life evolves easily, assuming Earth-like conditions, and the Rare Earth hypothesis doesn't require very much hoop-jumping, new physics, or bizarre probability arguments, it just requires serious consideration of the possibility that organic life-as-we-more-or-less know it may really be the only solution, and may really not be able to arise in very many places. If you dig into the prevailing wisdom against that idea, you'll find it's more philosophically sourced than scientifically sourced, there really are a lot of good reasons to think there aren't that many available chemical regimes life could work in, and in general it's probably the most scientifically-sound Fermi paradox answer. It's just not philosophically fashionable.)
[+] [-] khafra|14 years ago|reply
That's certainly the end of the Great Filter I'd prefer to be the significant one. Let's hope for no microorganisms on Mars, Titan, or Europa!
[+] [-] brandall10|14 years ago|reply
Let's imagine there are far more planets like ours that have life - let's throw intelligence out, because that is defined by some relative standard - which has not yet reached that capability. Why would we be interesting in the scope of these far more advanced extraterrestrial societies?
Perhaps they don't reach out because it would be as fruitless as us trying to communicate with ants. Perhaps they don't care to study us because we seem about as interesting as primordial soup (ie. a nuclear holocaust might be a trait of that). Perhaps intelligences like ours are well understood, well classified in the genus of the universe, and we are about as ordinary as a barnacle on the hull of a tug boat.
[+] [-] Roboprog|14 years ago|reply
Perhaps without FTL drive, it takes what explorers there might be a long time between (expensive!) visits, so sightings are rare. Without FTL, and without some kind of cold-sleep, a journey to the nearest stars pretty much takes a lifetime. A few would go, but not many.
It's too late (bedtime) for me to slap "Drake's equation" type numbers on this, but hopefully you get the idea. Maybe we've not seen anybody because they only visit any given planet every million years or so, and "they" equals 2 or 3 species local enough to even bother with that paltry schedule.
I'm not saying there is anybody out there, just that lacking pure freaking magic technology, it's a hell of a trip to make if they were. OTOH, if there is an outpost 100 light-years away, expect a visit in another 100 to 1000 years???
[+] [-] rsheridan6|14 years ago|reply
Any species that didn't have intellectual curiosity about things that aren't obvious useful would probably never make it off its home planet. A lot of the math and science that underlies stuff we use every day didn't seem useful when it was developed - see, for example, the theory of computation, worked out when there were no computers, and without which there probably still wouldn't be any computers.
[+] [-] aamar|14 years ago|reply
It may be electromagnetic leakage or Dyson spheres or any of a number of other signs of artifice.
[+] [-] luser001|14 years ago|reply
That is why it doesn't matter if 99.999% of the world is pre-occupied with one mindvirus or other. It's the 1-in-100k person who really takes humanity to the next level of greatness/depravity.
There will always be ambitious people for whom this world will be too small: they will colonize the next planet.
[+] [-] wisty|14 years ago|reply
In science, it might just be 1% of the top 1% who make the big breakthroughs - how many times did one guy make more than one really huge breakthrough? I can think of one big fuzzy-haired counterexample.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|14 years ago|reply
And they're doing very well. It's very rare to pick up a device that does just one thing -- the days of the wristwatch and one-function cell-phone are gone. Now everything you touch is competing to take up all your braindwidth. Information is not passive any more; it's sticky. As a consumer you are not a entity who receives services from a webapp. You are a target for absorption by way of total immersion. Potential vendors can either get on board with your addiction or lose out to others who will. This is why we buy Facebook, Google, and game ads. Your brainwidth is already being sucked up. As vendors we have to go where our potential markets already are.
If you want to talk about extrapolating history, our books are full of useful examples. Time and time again people could not make the changes necessary for society to evolve so they packed up their bags and moved. You can't move any more, and lots of immersive content providers want to take your frustration and turn it into your being plugged in all day.
Who wants to go live on the moon? We can do a lot more exciting things in our own custom-designed universe. A couple hundred more years of this and we won't be going anywhere besides LEO or doing much of anything except patting ourselves on the back and telling ourselves how many important things we have right here.
[+] [-] jseliger|14 years ago|reply
This removes human agency, and it's only true if we, as individuals, want it to be true. (I'm 28, wear a watch, and use a paper notebook (http://jseliger.com/2011/05/11/eight-years-of-writing-and-th...) in addition to having an iPhone; but the iPhone only takes up as much mental bandwidth as I let it).
My brain is not a passive entity that is "being sucked up." People either let themselves be sucked up, or they don't.
EDIT: Also, if you want an interesting exploration of some of the trends you're describing, see Neal Stephenson's "Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out,": http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/opinion/17stephenson.html?... .
[+] [-] PaulHoule|14 years ago|reply
As for why we haven't met aliens, I think there are two more fundamental causes.
(1) In 2011 we know that many stars have planets. This should be no big surprise based on considerations of angular momentum. The trouble is that Jupiter-sized planets tend to get sucked into the accretion disks of their stars, and in the process they tend to destroy Earth-sized planets that exist in the habitable zone. Planetary systems are common, but habitable terrestrial planets are rare.
(2) Interstellar travel and communication is highly difficult. It's possible that some civilization will manage an interstellar travel event among billions of civilizations and billions of years. However, the percolation threshold for a self-sustaining and growing interstellar civilization will never be reached. (Civilizations won't establish an outpost around a secondary star and create additional colonies)
A few years ago I did an analysis of interstellar war. The obvious mode of attack is to launch a deadly bombardment against a planet before any possible counterattack. One clear conclusion was that if you launched a missile that traveled at 10% of the speed of light, it wouldn't matter much if that missile were tipped with a hydrogen bomb or not -- you just can't get enough energy from either nuclear fusion or fission to propel a starship at a reasonable speed. (If you go slow, a 1000-year generation starship would need tons of antimatter simply to keep warm.) Note that interstellar hydrogen would impact such a starship at high velocities harder than radiation from a nuclear reactor.
The corollary is that neither fusion energy nor fission energy is sufficient for interstellar propulsion
[+] [-] aamar|14 years ago|reply
Therefore, there is no real moral difference between richly populating such virtual worlds (once we can construct them--we can't quite, yet) and populating actual other planets. Nick Bostrom would say that even using the word "actual" is probably wrong, since we're likely living in a simulation already.
There's a simpler (maybe too obvious) answer to the Fermi Paradox: the window of time in which it seems worthwhile to communicate with aliens or to settle the galaxy is exceedingly brief.
[+] [-] lusr|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yhippa|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Taft|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ck2|14 years ago|reply
The universe is mind numbingly big - try to imagine how big and then quadruple that size and you are still wrong.
Just the observable universe is nearly 50 BILLION lightyears in each direction (there could be more and it's expanding).
(remember the deficit/debt demonstrations of "million" vs "billion")
We are trying to observe the equal of the other side of the world with optical and radio telescopes but essentially the best observations we can make out are just at the range of the doorframe to our home.
What if there is other human-like life but it's a million lightyears away - it's all but useless to us to even find out, they are long gone by the time their light and radiowaves ever get to us (and visa-versa). Now realize the nearest other galaxies are SEVERAL million lightyears away.
Try this on for size http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BjHvwSvpOw
[+] [-] nikcub|14 years ago|reply
A common average result for the Drake equation is 10,000 habitable planets capable of sending signals in our universe. But if you look at the equation and estimates they are a bit optimistic.
If you take fℓ from the equation, I don't think simply being of the right composition in the habitable zone is enough. The Earth formed life because of the moon, because we had been shiften off our axis which formed seasons, because we were made of enough iron to form a magnetic field, and we just happen to form a moon which protected the Earth from space debris and gave us tides (in short, the moon and magnetic field are essential to life on Earth, as well as the composition of the planet).
That is a lot of 'ifs' to add to the equation, which brings the chances of a planet even in the habitable zone having the same life-bearing characteristics as earth much, much lower. Even with thousands of planets in the habitable zone the chances of finding one that has a magnetic field, the right temperature, a moon, etc. are very very slim and when multiplied back into the Drake equation brings the result back to lower than 1 - meaning we are a complete fluke.
There is also the time portion of the equation. The Earth is 4.6B years old, and we have been capable of sending signals for only 100 years of that time. Even if our civilization survives for another 10,000 years it is still 10,000 years divided into 4.6B years - so even with the complete fluke of an Earth-like planet being created in a habitable zone takes place, we are still 1 in 460,000 chance of being around at the same time. If Drake gives us 10,000 possible habitable planets with life, the 1 in 460,000 factor of time brings it back to a lot less than 1 again.
I believe that Keppler will continue finding planets in the habitable zone, but they will look more like Mars and Venus than anything like Earth.
I find it interesting that the Drake equation, created to show that there must be other intelligent life, can today be used to show that we are very unique when it is adapted with what we know today. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#The_equation
[+] [-] shasta|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wazoox|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gerggerg|14 years ago|reply
...edit...
oooo, and I just thought of somethng. Or, they got so advanced that they realized they probably shouldn't alert the rest of the damn galaxy to their presence. Given how the human mind seems to be so accepting of things it doesn't understand.
[+] [-] tewolde|14 years ago|reply
Maybe even an intergalactic SOPA is in place!
[+] [-] narrator|14 years ago|reply
The universe is a big place. There are probably trillions of habitable planets. We're just not that special. Maybe one day, if we somehow become "worth it", they'll stop by.
[+] [-] joshu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Roboprog|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firefoxman1|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkramlich|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firefoxman1|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frankil|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bfrs|14 years ago|reply
Something along similar lines:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/257096/crap-is-everyth...
[+] [-] ccc3|14 years ago|reply
Evolution simply could never have anticipated...
Evolution, by definition, doesn't anticipate anything. It's disappointing to see a university professor writing on evolution who seemingly doesn't even understand the evolutionary process.
[+] [-] redwood|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] moocow01|14 years ago|reply
Oddly enough, I think its an optimistic outcome if we play video games and never meet aliens in that if they function like us, it will be either us exploiting them or them exploiting us unless we amazingly are right on par with each other. Sorry to be so pessimistic, its just that we have consistently failed pretty hard as a race in how we treat other creatures and the environment.
[+] [-] themgt|14 years ago|reply
b) We can't begin to conceive of the sort of technological advances achieved by other lifeforms. The fermi paradox rests on probabilities accumulated over billions of years, but ignores how briefly human intelligence has existed - the written word is only a few thousand years old. If your species advances to the point of being able comprehend and control all of reality, is there much point in having endlessly bigger LCDs powered by your awesome discworld, built by your giant starfleet? Is our faith in the inevitability of endless growth and expansion not itself a sort of primitive cargo cult?
If the entire process of going from advanced social being with primitive tools and language to a post-physical singularity takes on average 50,000 years, the drake equation need changing
[+] [-] simondlr|14 years ago|reply
It is almost like saying: "You can do anything and become what you want to become." What do you choose?
[+] [-] bluekeybox|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ballstothewalls|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zalthor|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsheridan6|14 years ago|reply
On the other hand, if just one person with control of an adequate supply of nuclear weapons (or other super-weapons, possibly including ones that haven't been imagined yet) decides to wipe out humanity, he stands a good chance of succeeding. This seems much more plausible than mass suicide via entertainment.
[+] [-] freshhawk|14 years ago|reply
I agree that violent distruction is more likely now, but I think that that is probably an easier problem to solve than this one.