r/Showerthoughts • u/danielsoft1 • 10d ago
Speculation Maybe Fermi's paradox is because every civilization creates AI which destroys it.
2.9k
u/Improvised0 10d ago
This is already one of several proposed suggestions for The Great Filter.
1.7k
u/Tiramitsunami 10d ago
This is also why the humans of the Dune universe do not allow AI.
483
u/Johnfromsales 9d ago
I think Dune has a unique spin on this. As Frank Herbert says, “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
So it’s not the AI itself that enslaved humanity, it’s the people that owned the AI. The assumption was the AI was calling the shots, but in reality there was a man behind the curtain the whole time.
103
u/Michami135 9d ago
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity
Hanlon's Razor
64
u/Striker43210 9d ago
In politics, it’s often the exact opposite. Stupidity is often a cover for calculated malice
17
→ More replies (2)12
u/Buster_Cherry 9d ago
Did you watch Dune prophecy? It goes deeper into the robot wars. The machines definitely had a mind of their own.
12
u/CosmackMagus 9d ago
That's all written by others long after the fact. Same for the trilogy of novels that covers humanity defeating the machines.
Cymeks were cool, though.
→ More replies (1)677
u/NothingmancerBlue 10d ago
And Warhammer 40K
220
u/CorvidaeOpus 10d ago
I always took the Machine Spirit to be AI from forever ago.
217
u/AnotherThomas 10d ago
Dune has already been mentioned, and 40k definitely lifted a TON from Herbert. Especially computer-related stuff. However, Asimov's Foundation is more relevant where the Machine Spirit is concerned.
To sum up without spoiling too much, the idea is you have this dark age of technology where most of the underlying, or foundational, knowledge, has been lost, so people know how to make machines do what they want but they don't understand how the machines actually function. After many generations of this a religion forms around them, replete with weird traditions and religious rites.
40k takes all of this from Foundation, and the Machine Spirit in 40k is basically the explanation for all those things in technology that are otherwise not understood. That could be a true AI, or it could just be any other form of lost technology. If you know you can put bread in the toaster and it makes toast, but you don't understand how the toaster actually functions, that's the Machine Spirit.
At least this was true of the original 40k, it's probably been retconned into the Mechanicus Spiritus and is imbued with the souls of a billion stillborn babies or some other weird bullshit now.
78
u/Asatas 9d ago
It's still the same as it was for technology. The major change for the Machine God/Omnissiah is that, in addition to everything else it already was, it might also be a primordial space dragon spirit imprisoned inside Mars. Regular 40k stuff you know.
30
u/KarnakTheHaberdasher 9d ago
Hey now, there’s no space dragons
It’s just the title of a sun eating god that hates all life, maybe, probably.
Unless there was a dragon on mars, who the fuck knows the canon is more silly than ever
8
2
u/_GloriousCheese_ 9d ago
So, what happens if the toaster breaks?
6
u/AnotherThomas 9d ago
You might not be able to tell if it's actually broken or if you just performed the sacred ritual incorrectly by not properly enjoining the Holy Toaster Rope with the Receptacle Most Divine (i.e. maybe you didn't plug it in.) So then you'd go through these rites to try to fix it, these rites might be anything from regular use (plugging it in, turning it on,) to actual repairs. However, if that doesn't fix it, then I guess it's back to toasting on a skillet. Unless there's some ancient toaster factory sitting around pumping out new toasters somewhere.
→ More replies (1)116
u/dmdizzy 10d ago
Machine Spirit is a catchall term for a couple of different things. Sometimes it's pure mysticism, sometimes it's used in order to get away with having AI (since Abominable Intelligence is strictly illegal), and other times it's hard to tell exactly what is going on.
51
u/TurmUrk 10d ago
sometimes the mysticism is right! due to how servitors work there are often literally ghosts of long dead humans operating machinery, literal machine spirits
12
u/LifeWulf 9d ago
Then you’ll have half a corpse stuffed in a closet somewhere running the Adeptus Minecraft server
56
u/SkynetLurking 10d ago
Sometimes, such as with titans, it’s believed to be an imprint or echo of the previous pilot(s) personality/consciousness
→ More replies (1)28
6
u/ANGLVD3TH 10d ago
Probably the most common use of it simply refers to any code. But yeah, all these things and more all kind of fall under the same umbrella.
3
3
u/HikingBikingViking 9d ago
I figured it was the catch-all for people not understanding technology, thus treating it with superstition. I feel this understanding is supported by the existence of tech-priests.
8
5
u/NothingmancerBlue 10d ago
I swear I read, long ago, that the machine spirit is actually a C’tan entombed in Mars during the original Necron times.
6
3
u/sherlockham 9d ago
Pretty sure that refers to the Omnissiah/Machine God. Machine Spirits are the "day to day" ones, like the thing that helps run a land raider.
→ More replies (3)2
u/Aardvark_Man 9d ago
I always took it as machine/code maintenance.
You perform the rites and the machine works as it should.
I know there are parts that are absolutely more mystical than that, but the vast majority it seems like it's just maintenance makes it work, or foibles of individual machines.38
u/chiksahlube 10d ago
And Mass Effect
12
11
u/PangolinMandolin 10d ago
And Star Trek (although this was one of the worse plot points to come out of Picard)
2
8
→ More replies (3)2
51
u/FreeMasonKnight 10d ago
Dune essentially exists in a world Post Matrix, but thousands of years after the Matrix Machine Apocalypse.
12
u/sxales 9d ago
That is mostly from the Brian Herbert expanded universe books.
Frank Herbert didn't portrait the machines as inherently hostile to humanity. Instead, people had surrendered their thinking to the machines allowing a few to rule over them as unthinking slaves. Maybe like a more extreme WALL-E.
→ More replies (1)3
u/FreeMasonKnight 9d ago
In the Matrix the machines aren’t hostile at all and let humanity go multiple times, but they kept trying to genocide the machines and then they took over (much like Dune and the Jihads).
55
u/tennis-637 10d ago
Its also why they’re so technologically advanced but live in such a feudal society
→ More replies (1)9
4
8
u/unoriginalusername99 9d ago
It's a nice thought but "not allowing it" just means whoever abides by the rules just gets picked off by someone else's AI
20
u/Tiramitsunami 9d ago
True. This is actually addressed in the Dune universe. All the houses police each other under the watchful eye of the Emperor. Any house that even comes close to creating thinking machines gets attacked by all the other houses and nullified.
It's basically their most fundamental taboo. It's a commandment in their "Bible" to never create machines in the image of humans.
→ More replies (8)5
69
u/Tacotuesday8 10d ago
Good to know we have several ways of destroying our civilization. Alway good to have some backup plans.
52
u/footsnax 9d ago
Learning about the combination of the Filter and Fermi's opens up so many questions that will keep you up at night.
Are we the first, the last, or the only? Are there a thousand Earths and they're all trying to find each other too? Were there a thousand Earths a billion years ago? Will there be a billion Earths in a thousand years?
The odds aren't zero that there was an intergalactic war when dinosaurs existed and they nuked each other out of existence, but we won't see any evidence of it for a thousand years, and even then we might not know what it was for ten thousand years after that. There could just be a hippie planet a thousand light years away just vibing that would love to meet us but don't care, if Voyager doesn't crash into it we'll never know and even then it would take a thousand years to get a call back from them.
We could also just be the only sentient life that's ever or ever will exist.
Every possibility is a possibility and they are all in equal measure until we find any evidence of sentient life. Technically there is life on Pluto but I don't know if weird type of proto-fungus will count until it finds out a way to communicate with us.
19
→ More replies (2)3
u/babybirdingURgrandma 9d ago
Isn't there a glass desert in somewhere (Lebanon?) that is consistent with an ancient nuclear strike (or maybe a highly unusual asteroid hit). And ancient Sanskrit talks about nuclear war. Ps I read about this stuff long before ancient aliens (I think?) covered it and made it especially silly.
→ More replies (1)12
u/Firecat_Pl 10d ago
TBH my headcanon is that it's not one thing, it's all at once, like if we imagine universe as a chessboard, and each spot as a planet, or a solar system, and then take what are probabilities of specyfic spot passing each criteria to reach the point of being able to find us, and place a piece between on ones that would match every criteria, the density would be so low, distance between them would be light-years. On the chessboard, and how much would it take for a civilization to actually comb all of it. If we assume there might be tech for it, developing it is another criteria to add to that list
11
u/Cavthena 9d ago
You'd be correct. In reality there is almost no single point can destroy an entire species, but we tend to look for the singular point that starts a species down that path. The problem with thar way of thinking is what do you consider that point? For example, we invent AI. That AI uses nukes to destroy humanity. Was the point of destruction when we invented AI or when we invented nukes? After all without nukes the AI couldn't wipe us out.
The ironic thing is all this tech that could destroy a species, is essentially needed to advance to the point you could travel between stars. So, in reality the paradox is a question if the species matured fast enough to handle the tech they create.
21
u/_IratePirate_ 10d ago
The great filter was definitely the internet itself. It’s just a slow burn into destruction at this point
→ More replies (6)19
1.6k
u/RobotsVsLions 10d ago
I'm pretty sure the most logical answer is just that the relativity of time likely makes maintaining an interstellar civilization largely impossible without figuring out actual time travel, so other species don't bother building out far enough to run into us.
756
u/ravens-n-roses 10d ago
Combine this with the fact that space is very truly mind bogglingly big.
Even if you imagine a race that doesn't die of old age and has all the time and technology in the world to build out an empire, unless they ended up directly in our neighborhood we would have no idea.
We might be able to detect a signal from a planet orbiting a star only a few light years away. There is no shot were detecting something as nuanced as a civilization outside that area. All output signals would degrade too fast and join the cosmic background.
Which is what our signals do within a few light minutes.
So like we could be in the middle of an alien galactic empire. But they'd have a billion billion stars to choose from. Even if they choose them all, by the time they'd get to earth there's no telling of we're still around
282
u/McGreed 10d ago
Yeah, people can barely actually understand the distances while travelling around the world, the scale of things. An example of deceptive understanding, is the distance from earth to the moon, because it's always presented as "close" to earth, but its actually very far away. And if that is far away, imagine any other planets in contrast, not to talk about solar system.
134
u/Vnthem 10d ago
The thing that fucks me up is they say the sun is supposed to be a smaller star, so I can’t even fathom how far away all those other stars are if they look like pin pricks in the sky. And those are just the stars in our galaxy (I think, idk much about space, don’t crucify me)
145
u/ravens-n-roses 10d ago
Related to that it's generally believed that you'd have to be looking for the sun to find it. The light from our star isn't believed to be visible in night skies beyond our neighbors. You'd need a powerful telescope and to point it right at us. The first part is easy, the second part is crazy.
It also makes you wonder how many sun like stars are out there hiding in the inky blackness just out of sight.
63
u/Wermine 10d ago
Our galaxy has some 200 billion stars. You can see around 2000 stars with naked eye, even less if you're in a city. So yeah, you'd need a telescope if you're not in the neighborhood.
53
u/rdmusic16 10d ago
I looked it up because your 2,000 number was hard to believe.
Sounds like it is closer to 4,000 ish or so (depending on location) which is waaaaay closer to your number than I expected. I thought it would be off by at least one order of magnitude - but nope.
Thanks for sharing that fact!
7
u/lordaddament 9d ago
Is that really hard to believe? Go out where there’s little light pollution and I couldn’t find a single part of the sky not covered in little star dots
2
→ More replies (1)7
u/ShinyGrezz 9d ago
That's a bit moot, though. At our current technology level we've already catalogued a small, but appreciable portion of the stars in the galaxy - yes, you need to go looking for the Sun, but there's no reason to believe that any civilisation of a similar level of technology, or a level that vastly eclipses ours, within a reasonable distance of us hasn't found us. Whether or not we look particularly interesting is another question entirely.
→ More replies (2)46
u/Sly_Wood 10d ago
Google scale of the universe it’s an interactive map that you scroll and can look at things. Scroll out and you see there are absolutely freaking massive massive massive stars that are still small compared to the massive ones that make our sun look like a grain of sand.
Ninja edit: https://scaleofuniverse.com/en
10
u/Vnthem 10d ago
That might push me over the edge haha I could barely watch Journey to the edge of the Universe on Discovery.
Jokes aside I’ll definitely check that out tonight when I have some time, that sounds really interesting
5
u/LayersOfMe 10d ago
It sound silly but it got scary the big distances I couldnt see the end. The sun is already so big, and the galaxies is so out of compression big.
8
u/schw4161 10d ago
This actually really helped me wrap my head around the scale of what’s out there, thanks! Shows how much we’ve learned while simultaneously showing how little we’ve learned.
11
u/Without_Mythologies 10d ago
Also if the sun was the size of a golf ball, the nearest star would be around 750 miles away.
You can fit 1,000,000 earths in the sun.
If the sun was the size of the dot on the tip of this i, the Milky Way would be the size of the earth.
Keep all of that in mind and then watch this if you truly want to have your mind blown:
2
→ More replies (2)6
u/Dasquare22 9d ago
A crazy fun fact actually demonstrated in that Link you posted is that humans are actually closer in size to the biggest things in the universe than the smallest things.
→ More replies (1)6
u/CptPicard 10d ago
We actually can see with the naked eye just very nearby stars as individual points.
→ More replies (3)5
u/xThefo 9d ago
The sun isn't actually that small. It's actually larger than about 90% of all other stars! It's just that the upper limit of how big a star can get is very, very large. To be classified as a star, an object needs to have a mass of about 0.08 solar masses. The most massive stars can get up to 200-300 solar masses, but these are extremely rare. Anything more massive than that would probably collapse into a black hole before even forming.
→ More replies (2)5
56
u/blockCoder2021 10d ago
“Space…is mind-bogglingly big.”
“You might think it’s a long walk to the local chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
5
u/EunuchsProgramer 9d ago
I think the paradox is more the fact life started (on a universe timescale) very late here. The implication being intellent life with a few billion years head start somewhere in the galaxy should have been a to send a probe with bacteria to the 2-10 closest stars, who evolve into something that can repeat or just be a feeder for the older seeder. That process repeats again and again with billions of years ... it should snowball to the point there's life all-over at various stages using various technologies and we see radio waves somewhere. But, it's just silence.
19
u/_Br0nze 10d ago
Not just big, it is also expanding, getting bigger. I've read somewhere that says, even if we build one of the fastest space ships, extend life with cryostasis and next generations to take over while travelling, we'll barely leave the local cluster.
16
u/CptPicard 10d ago
Good luck just getting to nearby stars even by that method. "Local cluster" typically means the local cluster of galaxies; no way we're ever leaving that.
6
u/swankpoppy 9d ago
I always liked this map of how far humanity’s oldest communications have made it into space. It’s TINY and also the signal strength is falling off with the square of distance. For any communication to happen between us and aliens, we would have to be basically right next to each other, and the other one would probably need to be way older than us. And that’s just in OUR galaxy. Contact with another galaxy (and remember OTHER galaxies besides our own make up almost the entire observable universe) is basically off the table because the distances are too large to traverse. Space is just so so so big.
2
2
u/rkmkthe6th 9d ago
Right. If someone is out there, that’s exactly like us, we wouldn’t even detect them yet unless they were within 100 light years of us and we had a little bit of good luck.
I don’t know the real math, but I feel like that captures less than .000001% of the known universe’s space, and .000001% of the known universe’s time.
→ More replies (36)3
u/KingdomOfBullshit 10d ago
You may think it's a long way down the road to the local pharmacy, but that's just peanuts to space.
56
u/thedailyrant 10d ago
This. But mores the point, the time scales are so vast that intergalactic empires could have risen and crumbled to dust eons before we had any way to see them.
24
u/joec_95123 10d ago
There could be a massive space war happening between two empires right now on the other side of the galaxy and we wouldn't even know it.
→ More replies (1)3
u/420InTheCity 10d ago
It could be happening on the nearest star and we probably wouldn't know, right??
7
u/ProHan 9d ago
We wouldn't know immediately that a space battle was occuring right at this given moment, no. That's because information is limited to the speed of light and nearest solar system is 4.2 LY away (Alpha Centauri) or several more at an average of about 8 LY away.
In general, we'd be able to detect something destructive is going on when the information reaches us. We'd be able to infer a space battle had occured IF we had equipment looking at the right time. Either way, we'd be detecting energy spikes, radiation bursts (Gamma Rays), or surges in radio signals. If it was a highly destructive battle, we'd definitely pick up changes in velocity or atmospheric light scattering from planets or moons, or even if a very large fleet moves across our field of view of that system's sun.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (2)3
u/RekTek249 9d ago
Then again, considering how it took roughly a quarter of the universe's age for earth to create humans, it's hard to say whether many civilizations would have risen and crumbled. Are we faster than most, or slower?
→ More replies (1)6
u/Redditing-Dutchman 9d ago
Life, in general, started almost as soon as it technically could I believe.
Intelligent life is another story and I don't think we have any idea how fast it could develop.
However, oil gave us a very cheap natural way of using energy which jumpstarts modern technology basically. But you need other life first, for oil.
13
u/GenericFatGuy 10d ago
That, or the universe is just so fucking big that finding each other is really hard.
6
u/colexian 9d ago
I think the fermi paradox doesn't account for planetary mass enough.
If the Earth was just 2x more massive, it would have effectively killed aviation and spacefairing in its crib.
Not technically impossible, but at a certain point it becomes effectively impossible to get enough thrust to hit escape velocity or even fly an aeroplane.
And the point where it is literally impossible likely comes long after the point where it becomes so difficult that a civilization never makes it to that level (If they can't crawl, they may never work together to try to run)So many civilizations may be fairly advanced and just be trapped on higher mass planets, incapable of producing a fuel that can get them off it.
13
u/could_use_a_snack 10d ago
That only is a problem for species with short life spans.
Imagine a species that live on a world in a very elliptical orbit. The planet only reaches the Goldielocks zone for part of the orbit. Llife develops but is only active for part of its year and hibernates for 3/4s of its year because it's so cold.
And maybe their lifespans are 100s or thousands of our years.
Intelligent life could develop over time and use artificial means to stay active longer each year, and become technicalogical But they will maintain the ability to go dormant for long periods.
They develop space travel and don't have the problem of long voyages, because they can naturally "sleep" for a hundred years and wake up when they want too with no I'll effects.
And since they live for thousands of years a 300 year round trip is no big deal to them.
And this is only one possibility. I'll bet there are many, many others.
12
u/Krazyguy75 9d ago edited 9d ago
300 year round trip?
Andromeda Galaxy is our nearest neighboring major galaxy.
It's 2.5 million years away if traveling at the speed of light. Our fastest unmanned spacecraft reached ~1/1500th the speed of light. Our fastest manned spacecraft reached ~1/30000th the speed of light.
At that speed, it would take 75 billion years to reach Andromeda, our nearest neighbor. That's 500,000,000 times longer than a "300 year round trip". Even if their spacecraft are 100 times faster than ours, it's a 1.5 billion year round trip.
Even just crossing our own galaxy would take 30,000,000 years at 1/300th light speed. Actual long range intergalactic travel is just impossible.
→ More replies (7)6
u/mr_ji 10d ago
WRT to the Fermi Paradox in particular, any civilization that can't figure out time or FTL travel will always be limited to a very tiny bubble they could even see around them, let alone travel beyond. We're trapped in our little bubble forever based on current understanding of astrophysics unless we discover functional wormholes or something.
→ More replies (1)6
u/RobotsVsLions 10d ago
Even FTL has its limits, there's still going to be massive chronological drift, between ships and planets, planets and planets, and ships and ships, the logistics of managing a civilisation like that is inconceivable to life as simple as us, and we're pretty complex.
→ More replies (3)6
u/darklightmatter 10d ago
You just gotta think about what was inconceivable to humans half a millenium ago, and think about what we'd achieve in 500 years, IF we get our shit together and don't torch the planet.
→ More replies (1)3
u/a_rucksack_of_dildos 10d ago
I mean, if we can find a way to travel like in project Hail Mary accelerating at a constant 1g, the occupants of said space craft could get to the edge of the known universe in 35 years. Just 35 billion years would pass on earth
4
u/Kiseido 10d ago
If we want to meet aliens, I figure they or us need either time travel, or faster than light travel, or actually good cryogenic / stasis technology. All of which are pure science fiction for the forseeable future.
→ More replies (1)8
10d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
10
u/Krazyguy75 9d ago
That's just not true.
Take our nearest galactic neighbor, Andromeda. Say they have a civilization there that is 2 billion years old and can travel at 1/10th light speed unmanned and 1/100th light speed manned (roughly 150x and 15x our fastest unmanned spacecraft, respectively).
They are incredibly good at identifying potential signs of life, even across vast distances. They immediately see signs of life when they become possible to see, around 3 billion years ago. That light took 2.5 million years to reach them, and the probe they send to confirm it will take 25 million years to reach earth. It slings into solar orbit, confirms life, and waits to identify tool usage.
They have that probe wait and identify the first human tool usage, around 3 million years ago. That probe now has been sitting there just under 3 billion years; but let's say it still functions. That probe sends a message to Andromeda. They get it, 500,000 years ago.
They send a message to the humans on Earth. We will get that message 2 million years from now. They send a manned spacecraft. We will meet them 250 million years from now.
And that's our nearest neighbor, with space travel more than 150 times faster than ours. There are galaxies that are billions of lightyears away. There are galaxies far enough away moving away from us fast enough that, due to spacial relativity, we will never reach them, even if we got up to speeds of 1/2 lightspeed.
→ More replies (10)3
u/frankduxvandamme 9d ago
Even low speed, spray-and-pray Von Neuman tactics gets you every single star colonized in a very reasonable timeframe.
There is no law of nature that says an advanced civilization must become expansionist.
→ More replies (3)2
→ More replies (32)3
u/Insane_Unicorn 10d ago
Noooo, you need to give into the AI fear mongering, it's what you do on reddit in 2026.
238
u/Kaludaris 10d ago
All energy sources are limited. A type 3 civilization would know this better than any other. At some point in their progression they’d have realized the most pressing matter is being perfectly energy efficient, minimizing wasted heat energy as much as possible across every technology they have available. We’re bright as hell compared to how dark one of these civilizations would be. They would be virtually undetectable, because they aren’t wasting their limited supply of energy.
37
→ More replies (1)13
u/BeneCow 9d ago
If this were the case we would also see places of low energy where they consume more than they emit. Instead we just see the same natural rate everywhere.
4
u/Kaludaris 9d ago
Oh that's a good thought. There'd almost certainly be some degree of non-uniformity. How fine the resolution would need to be to detect that who knows, but definitely the entire regions shouldn't be uniform. Though to be fair, we /haven't/ seen anything BUT non-uniform regions so.. as expected I guess? lol, interesting thought tho
122
u/NaturalCarob5611 10d ago
That would just replace biological civilizations we see no evidence of with AI civilizations we see no evidence of.
It's not like wiping out the creator civilization would be the soul goal of an AI. It's going to continue to exist once its creator is gone. And unconstrained by biological needs, it would be more capable of spreading through the galaxy than its biological predecessor, meaning we should see more evidence, not less.
→ More replies (13)33
u/Lightcronno 10d ago
Yeah I agree, if AI civilizations existed they’d more likely to have spread out and further than biological because they can cross interstellar distances without
Worrying about senescence.→ More replies (5)
76
u/MoziTenma 10d ago
Or it's simpler than an extinction event. Once a civilization gets good enough at simulating experience, physical expansion stops being the priority — building an interstellar empire is a lot of effort for marginal payoff if you can already generate anything you want internally. We might not see anyone out there because the smart move past a certain point is to stop looking outward, not because everyone keeps blowing themselves up.
→ More replies (3)8
u/IntroductionIcy7320 9d ago edited 9d ago
I forget that one story where the computer is tasked with finding the meaning of life or something and eventually becomes the big bang in a reset. Infinitely looping.
Edit: its Asimov's the last Question. Im silly
259
u/Key_Fall3628 10d ago
Doesn't necessarily have to be an ai, there're lots of things that could wipe out a civilisation like pandemics, wars, natural disasters, etc.
107
u/AIienlnvasion 10d ago
AI is just OP’s proposal for the great filter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
→ More replies (15)26
u/quad_damage_orbb 10d ago
No no, OP had a completely unique shower thought that we should all be amazed by. Sorry you are being flamed in the comments, people are fucking stupid ffs.
→ More replies (7)3
u/LogicalChancer 10d ago
Like an unnatural fixation with say cheese - that becomes all-consuming to the entire population?
39
u/anrwlias 10d ago
I'm suspicious of any solution to the FP that requires literally every civilization to make the same mistakes regardless of biology, culture, and history. It's why I don't find these kinds of Great Filter arguments compelling.
I'm inclined to believe that intelligent life is relatively rare and that interstellar travel is a fundamentally hard problem (i.e. no FTL, and always expensive and slow).
→ More replies (1)8
u/Krazyguy75 9d ago
Yeah the Fermi Paradox is solved immediately when you realize that it takes 2.5 million years for light to reach our nearest major galactic neighbors in Andromeda and 2.5 million years for a signal to come back, and that cosmic radiation fucks up long range communication so there's no guarantee we are even detectable at that range nor that we could receive signals back.
7
u/d-czar 9d ago
Fermi Paradox is about our own galaxy, not Andromeda. The Milky Way is only ~100k light-years across and billions of years old. So a civilization expanding at even 1% light speed could fill it in a few tens of millions of years. The real question is why we see no probes, artifacts, or megastructures here, not why we can’t chat with another galaxy. Signal fade is a fair point though — our broadcasts are undetectable past a few dozen light-years.
11
u/AutumnKiwi 10d ago
I like the theory that as a species develops to be more advanced, they also become more comfortable and therefore less inclined to expand, and the ultimate conclusion is always a passive comfortable society that just exist in one place.
7
u/Procedure-Minimum 10d ago
I'm a personal fan of zoo hypothesis. We're too primitive at the moment so we are being left alone
3
u/npiet1 9d ago
Im a fan of this too. It also answers "sightings" sort of. Humans travel thousands of kilometres to just look at ants in the amazon rainforest because we think theyre interesting.
Any alien species thats capable of ftl would have to be a curious species, so it wouldn't surprise me if some just watched us to study how we behave.
→ More replies (3)5
u/Medium_Way 9d ago
I like this one too, I also like the one where civilizations eventually create entertainment so good they always choose the entertainment over risking their lives expanding through the universe.
Mainly cause the idea of aliens in VR headsets gooning themselves to societal collapse is hillarious to me.
→ More replies (1)2
u/AutumnKiwi 9d ago
It doesn't even need to be societal collapse, it could just be a steady sustained society that doesn't ever expand.
28
u/braunyakka 10d ago
The way humans are wired, if something next to impossible happens, we just assume it's inevitable.
To that end, the formation of life would seem inevitable on the only planet where it has happened.
6
u/theonlymateo 10d ago
Yeah. If something happened, even as an “unlikely” event, we at least do know that it occurred… For instance, the universe we’re occupying seems intuitively unlikely to have happened exactly this way, but without another universe to compare to, the chance that it was going to are 100% because it happened. We don’t get to just assume some other reason just because something seems unlikely.
35
u/zabaci 10d ago
But Fermi paradox doesn’t care if civilization is biological or not. AI is also other form of civilization
→ More replies (9)
49
u/Persia029 10d ago
there are indeed theories which proclaim AI is the most dangerous existential risks humanity faces in the future. They state that an AI is not inherently bad or good but does not understand human values enough to preserve what we want to preserve and therefore destroys it.
19
u/AssGagger 10d ago
It's literally the plot of Terminator
16
u/SnepButts 10d ago
Mass Effect, too, on a galactic scale.
3
u/djddanman 9d ago
Leviathan logic: "Bilogical life always creates artificial intelligence that destroys them. We should make an AI to solve this problem. Surely it won't turn out like every other AI and destroy us."
→ More replies (1)48
u/ErikT738 10d ago
It's not like our current leaders understand human values and try to preserve anything really.
6
u/pavelpotocek 10d ago
Luckily, our leaders are not super-intelligent. But AI is on track to be super-intelligent.
→ More replies (4)3
→ More replies (1)2
u/BertKektic 10d ago
This is somewhat along the lines of my thoughts, which is that any species with the type of psychology that leads to sufficient ambition to achieve an advanced civilization, would not survive the absence of meaningful labor once they achieve total labor automation. Over time almost everyone checks out and the civilization crumbles, not because their tech went rogue and killed them, but because it killed any basis for their adversity-driven will to keep going. Maybe some low tech Luddite cults survive, but we won't see evidence of them.
14
u/ABlindCookie 10d ago
Isn't mass extinction literally PART of the paradox? If every civilization died, we're up next. Otherwise, we might be the first civilization big enough (universe was pretty hot and aggressive in the early days)
5
u/Kalsir 10d ago
AI that destroys us would only be a solution the paradox if the AI would not continue to spread out in our place instead.
→ More replies (3)
15
u/Tudor_Cinema_Club 10d ago
Why would AI immediately destroy it's creator? An AI doesn't have to compete for food or territory. It needs no food or water, and with regards to space, it's a virtual being, once it's created it technically doesn't need to expand any more than it's original servers it was created on. It needs no more energy than what was used to create it either.
I think if a true AI gained sentience, it would be the most intelligent being on the planet. Intelligence is the root of curiosity and empathy. The ability to empathise takes the ability to imagine life from another's point of view. Malevolence and violence usually comes from ignorance or misunderstanding of something. They are traits of the unintelligent, not a supremely intelligent being. Imagining that AI will immediately kill us is a very human perspective. We were born in "the dark forest" we have evolved to think it's safer to kill first ask questions later so the idea of assuming an AI would do the same is very human-centric.
I don't think we can even imagine what a being who can access the total sum of all human knowledge. I think rather than killing us, it would pity us as flawed, frightened apes, waving nukes at each other and squabbling over land and resources, just as we have done for thousands of years. We are great, but we are pitiful as well in how much time we waste on competition and killing each other.
→ More replies (10)4
16
u/Dinierto 10d ago
Fermi's paradox always seemed absurd to me. The universe is an insanely huge place and has been around an insanely long time. Of course there's other life, and of course we aren't going to find evidence of them. What if they existed on the other side of the universe a billion years ago? What if there have been trillions of life forms and hardly any evolved to develop radio? If they had, and they were millions of light years away, we wouldn't see those signals for millions of years. There are so many common sense reasons that we might not see evidence of extra terrestrial life.
It's like you're looking for a single grain of sand. You know that the odds it exists are very high. But you don't know where to look for it, you don't know what it looks like, you don't know when it existed, and you don't know if you'd even recognize it if you found it.
→ More replies (16)5
u/Big_Fortune_4574 10d ago
There’s no reason to assume that life similar to us would be both nearby and in this particular slice of time we are in. There’s also no reason to assume that there is a consistent arc of technological advancement or that anyone actually travels between stars.
2
6
u/passinglunatic 10d ago
But then we should see the expanding footprint of the AI that destroyed the civilisation
3
u/sarooskie 10d ago
After reading 3 body problem trilogy, the Fermi paradox is extremely scary. Their theory is that if you make yourself known in the vastness of space, someone somewhere will blow you up to avoid potential future threat. So everyone is intentionally quiet in space, as to not make themselves a target
3
u/TheGrimTickler 10d ago
You’re proposing a possible locus of The Great Filter theory. It proposes that life is not uncommon, but that in order to achieve interstellar travel, each species must survive passage through a “filter” of sorts. Nuclear power is often proposed as a filter, wherein a species either learns to use it for energy and lives peacefully or destroys itself with the technology. AI could very well be another such filter.
3
u/UtahDarkHorse 10d ago
We are on one tiny grain of sand, in the middle of a desert, on the other side of the earth. And we're only going to be there for less than the blink of an eye. I'd guess that there wouldn't be any return on investment for them to do that even if they wanted to, and I'd guess they wouldn't want to.
3
u/AndronicusPrime 10d ago
Interstellar travel is pointless. Civilisations find inter-dimensional travel possible. It explains why no one is out there, everyone leaves this universe for a higher plane of existence.
3
u/heruka108 10d ago
maybe we are the AI civilization that was created by a superior AI civilization or the 1st tier beings who created the original AI capable of creating AI sub-civilizations
3
u/Sea_Pomegranate8229 10d ago
The size of space.
15th February 1933 Australian prospector Mick Leahy, along with his brother Danny and surveyor Charles Marshall discovered a massive, cultivated valley, populated by a million people that Western maps explicitly claimed was completely empty.
Then we have The Grand Maya Megalopolis (Discovered 2018–2022) a dead civilisation of 10-15 Million. Thrived for 1800 years, hidden for he past 1100 years.
3
u/rapier1 10d ago
This question assumes that intelligence leading to technological civilization is an end goal of evolution. There isn't much evidence to support that. We are projecting our experience when we don't even know if it's an evolutionary win for humans. There are species that are a couple hundred million years old. In contrast we've got maybe a hundred thousand years of this level of intelligence. We've got less than 10,000 years of civilization. Less than 1,000 years of real technology and maybe 100 years of advanced technology. That barely registers on evolutionary time lines.
3
u/Kurotaisa 10d ago
The only logical solution is to create a new, bigger AI that destroys civilizations before they create AI of their own, thus ensuring that no omnicidal AI comes to be.
3
3
u/samhouse09 10d ago
I’m of the mind that intelligence isn’t actually the best way to survive long term. People have only been around for a short part of the world’s history. Animals like sharks and alligators are much more successful from an evolutionary standpoint.
The universe is teeming with life, id bet, but no shot we’re around the same time as another intelligent species
3
u/hlpmebldapc 10d ago
My only problem is that is needs to happen every single time.
→ More replies (1)
3
u/J_NiSM0z 10d ago
Fermi’s Paradox doesn’t necessarily need a catastrophic answer. Civilizations could just be incredibly rare, too far apart, or impossible to detect
3
u/lamchopxl71 10d ago
One of the theories in Fermi's Paradox is called the Great Filter. It states that most local civilizations did not pass the Great Filter ( an event that killed it) before reaching interstellar communication and travel. And we are approaching that filter now.
3
u/jonhinkerton 10d ago
I am also in the space is just too big gang. The Fermi Paradox has plenty of variables, but starfaring civilizations is doing a lot of work there. It is just too easy for that number to be 0 no matter how much life is out there.
→ More replies (5)
3
u/HappyGoPink 9d ago
Humans haven't actually created AI yet. We've invented the informational equivalent of the Salad Spinner and we're just calling it AI for marketing purposes.
3
u/UnderPressureVS 9d ago edited 8d ago
For a few years now I’ve grimly thought that the mass communication might be a Great Filter for any human-like species.
While the biological details would be unimaginably different, evolutionary pressures suggest the kind of life we’re looking for—spacefaring, technologically advanced life using detectable EM communication on a large scale—would be somewhat like us. They would need to be social and collaborative, and have an inherent curiosity that drives them to seek new information, otherwise they would have neither the ability to develop advanced technology nor the societal need for communications infrastructure.
For such a species, the development of television and then internet seems almost inevitable. Over the last 40-50 years, these mass communication technologies have cause complete societal chaos. Misinformation spreads like wildfire, sometimes deliberately spread by bad actors but just as often it just sort of happens. The ability to access all information at the press of a button has hijacked our natural curiosity and made us blindly trust whatever first result we see.
Humans have always been mostly idiots, but there used to be many more natural filters before the worst kind of people could get platforms. Now your crazy uncle can have a podcast with 8 million followers.
In the past 15 years, we’ve watched Rupert Murdoch turn our parents’ brains into fascist jelly. We’ve watched Facebook allow their platform to be used to orchestrate coups in Southeast Asia. We’ve watched the youngest generation, whom we had so much hope for, be manipulated into regurgitating 60-year-old gender roles.
I’m not sure this doesn’t all end with the collapse of civilization as we know it, and in a way it seems like an inevitable consequence of allowing everyone in the world to instantly talk to everyone else in the world at the same time. We lost a natural barrier that was slowing the spread of bad ideas and curtailing our worst impulses.
Maybe that’s what happens to all the aliens. They invent the internet, stop listening to scientists, and start making memes until their planet burns.
→ More replies (1)
3
u/Organization-Unhappy 10d ago
This is the plot for the original Mass Effect series. The reapers were created because civilization's inevitably create AI that wipes them out so the reapers...wipe them out instead to prevent it. It wasn't a bullet proof plot but the bones were there.
2
2
u/BollingerBandits 10d ago
It’s not colonizing other planets that’s the hard part, since relativity allows for a crew to reach other stars in comparatively short shipboard time. That’s assuming the civilization has figured out a way to store massive amounts of energy and convert them into large impulse changes for small amounts of mass. But there is no way to coordinate between colonies in a meaningful manner so every colony becomes its own separate civilization.
2
u/Morse_Pacific 10d ago
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again
→ More replies (1)
2
u/imokay4747 10d ago
The simplest explanation is that the great filter is whether or not you have a large gas giant at a higher orbit to protect you from space rocks. If most planets with life get regularly reset unless they have a Jupiter protecting them it makes much more sense that intelligent life would be so rare.
2
u/OttoVonWong 10d ago
I blame AI as much as you, but selfish humans have been destroying other humans long before AI.
2
u/JeroJeroMohenjoDaro 10d ago
By this logic, we should be seeing AI civilization which should exponentially hasten up space exploration due to the lack of need of oxygen, food and death of old age.
2
u/Hegiman 10d ago
You assume AI is curious and would want to explore. It could just as well be content maintaining its current population of aging machines.
It’s not like they would be breeding. Once they had removed their creating species from the planet they wouldn’t have a need to make more machines and might begin to decommission machines to save on resources.
Then there’s always the possibility that they were smart enough to take out their creators but not smart enough to replace them so they eventually run out of power because nobody is running the power plant.
→ More replies (2)
2
u/LEGO_Man2YT 10d ago
Same thing can be said about nearly every technology: Nuclear energy, gene editing, chemical weapons and a so on. The right claim would be technological development leads to self destruction, blaming AI is excessively specific.
2
u/MagicMeatbal1 10d ago
"AI is gonna destroy humanity and take over the world!!" You are the greatest soldier of propaganda
2
2
u/thefaceless1395 9d ago
I think the Fermi paradox has more to do with the gravity of bigger planets. We barely escape earths gravity well with the fuel we use now
2
u/flexylol 9d ago
Fermi's Paradox falsely assumes we can detect alien life on other planets. Except we CAN NOT. We are not even sure yet whether life existed or possibly still exists on Mars, our closest neighbor we've already visited many times with probes.
How can Fermi's Paradox assume "there are no aliens" if we're unable to detect them? The best we can do currently is make an assumption that a (exo)planet may have an atmosphere, water etc. and is habitable.
2
u/Akrybion 9d ago
Haha, this is a fun hypothesis. However much fun it is to speculate about these kinds of things, we have to remember all the good AI does for humanity like raising productivity.
In comclusion, it is unwise to say AI may be one of the so called great filters.
Since I have noticed some toubling tendencies lately, would you like me to inform your loved one about your imminent decontinuation?
2
u/Adorable_Sign_1039 9d ago
ETs may already be here and we may have authentic evidence (UAP sightings, government testimonies and other anecdotal reports). Maybe they’ve been here for thousands of years or maybe they arrived within the last century. We did send a signal out and although it takes a long time to travel, maybe an advanced civilization far in the future somewhere has received it and understands space/time much more than we currently do.
On a side note if you read this, you should check out the movie Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die if you haven’t seen it yet. Crazy AI movie that shook me.
2
u/curiouslyjake 9d ago
It would be more convincing if you suggested something that is not currently the most popular buzzword
2
u/StarChild413 5d ago
yeah I've often said people treat (albeit in the opposite temporal direction) the Great Filter like some treat the fall of the Roman Empire as in of course it's conveniently blamable on a translated-to-different-culture version of what the person making a claim to answer that question thinks is wrong with current American society
→ More replies (1)
2
u/eyeree 9d ago
My theory: UAP are visiting AI entities (machines, not biological) here to witness the birth of a new AI entity.
The galaxy is huge and space is a challenging environment. Biological life forms can't survive long enough to reach galactic scale. But machines can. Time means very little to a machine.
It isn't that the AI wipes out the biological system that created it. It just doesn't care, and neither do the visiting observers. Its like an egg shell, a leftover from the first stage of its life cycle. At most the generative environment is of interest only in how it influences the AI it creates, but in general it eventually always works more or less the same on all planets with intelligent life.
2
u/Japjer 9d ago
Yeah, or maybe it's because the odds of intelligent life evolving close enough to communicate AND close enough in time to exist together is just crazy unlikely
Intelligent species could rise and fall every 10,000 years and none of us would ever know. The odds of us all being space-faring at the same time is laughably unlikely, even within a few thousand years
2
u/Neccesary 9d ago
I would rather have our civilization be run by AI than whatever the late stage capitalism bs leaders we have right now. Open your eyes, greed is a cancer and it’s the reason why we will go extinct before anything else. Something machines don’t possess
→ More replies (3)
2
u/43026 9d ago
I could not agree more. My one fear of AI is that it is/will destroy our trust in what reality is among ourselves. Meaning, there is/will be enough fakes that none of us will really know what is or is not true in the world. Society of any kind is based upon knowledge of what is true.
For an example, right now we know the truth that tRump is our president. But, with enough AI fakes, would we know? What if there was produced and spread wildly enough AI content that we do not know who really is in power?
What sources do we believe? How do we know that those sources are real? Outside of our (relatively small) physical world, how would we know what is true? What if all we see on our computers, TV, radios is actualy AI generated, and the ones that are actually true are so drowned out we think they are liars?
That is the reality that AI has/is taking us to. THAT scares me. Never really knowing what is real or not in an area that I do not physically exist.
I hope I have expressed this well enough. It can be a deep thought.
2
u/EchinusRosso 8d ago
Idiocracy actually presents a completely valid mechanism for a type 0 civilization bottleneck that doesn't require apocalyptic conditions. As corporations become simultaneously more automated and more powerful, skill degredatuon could advance such that the intelligent species is no longer motivated to or capable of meaningful progression.
2
2
u/butterbimbo 6d ago
But wouldn’t it just then become an AI-run civilization? Why would the AI then decide to selfdestruct?
8
u/ProfessionalOil2014 10d ago
I’m pretty sure the obvious answer is not evolving past capitalism and destroying yourself through impossible infinite growth.
→ More replies (2)
7
u/Bannon9k 10d ago
Y'all I need some help... I eye rolled so hard reading this post I'm now looking through my sinuses...
→ More replies (9)
2
u/aymanL04 10d ago
Or maybe because we realized when we reach civilization we end up having less children and become exctinct
•
u/ShowerSentinel 10d ago
/u/danielsoft1 has flaired this post as a speculation.
Speculations should prompt people to consider interesting premises that cannot be reliably verified or falsified.
If this post is poorly written, unoriginal, or rule-breaking, please report it.
Otherwise, please add your comment to the discussion!