Back on Dec. 16, I began a great intellectual adventure, one which reaches a climax today as we post our preprint: A Simple Model of Grabby Aliens Robin Hanson, Daniel Martin, Calvin McCarter, Jonathan Paulson
>The question is what is feasible for our descendants in say 10Myr. Seems hard for us to know that
Sure, we can't _know_ that, but the paper still presents fairly compelling reasons to be skeptical/update away from near-c speeds.
>our model predicts we'd see alien volumes if the speed was much slower.
But when we look to the sky and see nothing, we should also increase our credence that the aliens just aren't there, or that they never become grabby. Why wouldn't you mostly update in _those_ directions?
We cannot just assume grabby aliens into existence and then pretend that our observations only tell us about what they must be like, when our observations clearly have significant bearing on whether they exist at all.
The question is what is feasible for our descendants in say 10Myr. Seems hard for us to know that, and our model predicts we'd see alien volumes if the speed was much slower.
The prediction is that all these durations are drawn from the same distribution, not that they have exactly equal length. Estimates vary re time remaining.
And what if it turned out that traveling near the speed of light is not feasible?
(As argued here: https://www.scirp.org/pdf/N..."A speed limit based on shielding limited to avoid H atom irradiation limits velocity to less than about 0.5 c, which does not give a useful relativistic time dilation factor. Pushing a ship tohighly relativistic velocities using a light sail would not avoid deadly H irradiation.")
Then it would seem that we are either very early, or that grabby aliens are very rare, or both.
Why do you draw the conclusion that they must be traveling fast rather than that they aren't there? Or am I misunderstanding something
As I was reading a bit about this it reminded me of a project I did with my son earlier where we grew crystals in a medium. Maybe these civilizations could also be modeled like crystals growing at the speed of light with their paths somehow influenced by the initial apparent distribution of matter in space (potentially inferred by the map of cosmic microwave background radiation) as initial conditions?
Mindblowingly cool. Lots of people are going to cite this as an affirmation of the "humans are unique, special, and destined to take over all the universe we can reach ASAP" school of thought.
Me, I'm imagining what kinds of life might have evolved in the "radiation dominated" epoch, and whether sunspots might be civilizations of sun sylphs rising and falling.
Hope you get better! Also I’m very pleased to see you are using a computer sim in this case rather than trying to compute out the probabilities. That tends to avoid the worst problems with probability misuse in anthropic/sleeping beauty arguments.
Basically, as long as you keep the focus down on "in what fraction of the sims did the human sim see evidence like ours and X was true" you aren't likely to raise the worrying cases where you multiply the number of times the observers are instantiated as can happen without meaning too when computing without simulation.
Glad to hear you're better! :)
>The question is what is feasible for our descendants in say 10Myr. Seems hard for us to know that
Sure, we can't _know_ that, but the paper still presents fairly compelling reasons to be skeptical/update away from near-c speeds.
>our model predicts we'd see alien volumes if the speed was much slower.
But when we look to the sky and see nothing, we should also increase our credence that the aliens just aren't there, or that they never become grabby. Why wouldn't you mostly update in _those_ directions?
We cannot just assume grabby aliens into existence and then pretend that our observations only tell us about what they must be like, when our observations clearly have significant bearing on whether they exist at all.
The question is what is feasible for our descendants in say 10Myr. Seems hard for us to know that, and our model predicts we'd see alien volumes if the speed was much slower.
The prediction is that all these durations are drawn from the same distribution, not that they have exactly equal length. Estimates vary re time remaining.
And what if it turned out that traveling near the speed of light is not feasible?
(As argued here: https://www.scirp.org/pdf/N..."A speed limit based on shielding limited to avoid H atom irradiation limits velocity to less than about 0.5 c, which does not give a useful relativistic time dilation factor. Pushing a ship tohighly relativistic velocities using a light sail would not avoid deadly H irradiation.")
Then it would seem that we are either very early, or that grabby aliens are very rare, or both.
Why do you draw the conclusion that they must be traveling fast rather than that they aren't there? Or am I misunderstanding something
I hope you get better soon.
As I was reading a bit about this it reminded me of a project I did with my son earlier where we grew crystals in a medium. Maybe these civilizations could also be modeled like crystals growing at the speed of light with their paths somehow influenced by the initial apparent distribution of matter in space (potentially inferred by the map of cosmic microwave background radiation) as initial conditions?
Mindblowingly cool. Lots of people are going to cite this as an affirmation of the "humans are unique, special, and destined to take over all the universe we can reach ASAP" school of thought.
Me, I'm imagining what kinds of life might have evolved in the "radiation dominated" epoch, and whether sunspots might be civilizations of sun sylphs rising and falling.
I was just now able to open grabbyaliens with Chrome. 1430 on 2/3/21.
I can't access https://grabbyaliens.com; I get "We can’t connect to the server" in Firefox.
EDIT: I had to disable my corporate VPN to access the site. Not sure if it's the VPN's fault or the site's fault.
No.
Have you been using any antivirals?
Get well soon!
Congratulations, and I hope you get well soon!
Since I was told I was exposed, I've stayed in a separate bedroom/bathroom section of the condo I share with my still tested-negative wife.
Hope you get better! Also I’m very pleased to see you are using a computer sim in this case rather than trying to compute out the probabilities. That tends to avoid the worst problems with probability misuse in anthropic/sleeping beauty arguments.
Basically, as long as you keep the focus down on "in what fraction of the sims did the human sim see evidence like ours and X was true" you aren't likely to raise the worrying cases where you multiply the number of times the observers are instantiated as can happen without meaning too when computing without simulation.
I hope you get well soon! I also wish I'd seen your December 28 tweet.