Charles Stross recently on possible future great filters: So IO9 ran a piece by George Dvorsky on ways we could wreck the solar system. And then Anders Sandberg responded in depth on the subject of existential risks, asking what conceivable threats have big enough spatial reach to threaten an interplanetary or star-faring civilization. … The implication of an [future great filter] is that it doesn’t specifically work against life, it works against interplanetary colonization. … much as Kessler syndrome could effectively block all access to low Earth orbit as a side-effect of carelessly launching too much space junk. Here are some example scenarios: …
This is a years-old post, but I'm reading Steven LeBlanc's "Constant Battles" and your "Alien War Nightmare" post linked to this, so I wanted to chime in on forager warfare. Foragers might seem too low-density to come in contact with others much, but that's only if you focus on remaining ones like the Eskimo, !Kung or Aborigines who live in marginal territories others don't want. When foragers dominated the Earth, that included more productive areas supporting larger populations. As a percentage of their population, a LOT of foragers die from inter-group conflict. The same is true for male chimpanzees, who are also foragers and likely resemble our ancestors in their most ancestral environment.
Also, on wives being treated as property: my understanding is that Australian Aborigines (on the one continent that never developed agriculture) have a gerontocracy where older men have multiple wives.
Yes, you'd have your anti-berserker capabilities range to outside of your sphere. But even if a berserker gets through it'll get spotted and intercepted (you'll have defenses near your most important planets/bases too): after all, it has to get close to some important target before it can do any damage. If it tries to replicate inside your sphere or near it then that increased activity (heat output) will make it easier for you to detect the coming threat.
Most of all your doctrine will be to delay berserkers because in most scenarios you can (re)build your defensive capabilities faster than they can receive reinforcements.
Is that how the math works out? I'd think that since the vast majority of the volume is empty, increasing volume would be a liability and become more and more disproportionately expensive. But, since defending unoccupied of the sphere of influence isn't necessary, ultimately I agree with you.
That assumes detection is easy. But it is easy to make detection easy if your occupied territory is smaller than your Anti-berserker sphere of influence, which is what made me realize I was being silly and attempt to delete that comment.
A fGF needs to be nearly universal across all intelligent aliens that become space-faring, to explain the great silence.
But even if the Predator-Prey extinction trap somehow were universal across all alien races, at least some should have lasted long enough to send self-replicating machines out into the galaxy.
If you control your sphere then defense is always relatively easy: a lone berserker (or at least only a small number of them, given the vastness of space) enters your sphere after traveling for god knows how long, you have 20 anti-berserkers (cheaper than berserkers because they don't have to travel as far/fast) converge on it immediately, plus nearby resources and production facilities to build a million more anti-berserkers.
If you simultaneously grow fast in a large sphere, and if you in fact mostly control that sphere, then the probes they send from inside can't do that much damage, and the probes they send from outside take too long to get there. Once you have densely colonized a large volume you win on defending the surface area vs huge volume resources to draw upon.
The option you mentioned as a possible end to the griefer scenario, clearing out a large region of space surrounding one's location, seems to have big weaknesses. If you begin to clear out a large region of space then you are letting others know your approximate location. They could send probes of their own at you, or fling a star or two in your direction.
Now I'm worrying about interstellar false flag attacks.
Empires come and go... (historically they've also been prone to civil wars that weakened them until they could no longer defend against external enemies, external enemies who may consist of seceded parts of the empire itself).
Doesn't this end when random variation in predation abilities produces a super predator who takes everything? The predators you're describing seem like foragers, wandering around for prey. But the really good predators would probably use threat of predation to extract tributes, more like farmers who cultivate their prey, a.k.a. empire.
Btw, this post touches on a current ecological issue. The diminishing returns on hunting rare prey explains why some species have been critically endangered for decades without fully going extinct (wrongly convincing some people that environmental activists were just being alarmist). Tigers are probably a good example: the remaining wild tigers are so widely dispersed that poachers can't find them anymore, the species survives because it has the ability to find mates across huge distances (species that do not have this ability eventually go extinct when dispersed, but depending on lifespan this can take decades, even centuries when there is still sporadic mating, to current humans this can give the impression of such species doing ok).
The Oort cloud is said to be about a light-year in radius. And I don't think the cutoff is all that sharp. Shall we take bets on how big the cloud around Alpha Centauri is?
For the predator-prey scenario to play out in a time of solar colonization and great scientific progress then some weird regressive irrationality need to win out, like superior but defunct runaway constructs, artificial mind-virus pandemics, or some weird evolution of humans. It's also a scenario local in scope, so not really "The Great Filter", just one of many possible outcomes some species might face.
Assuming the galaxy is in fact unexploited and clear of griefers, and assuming there is a single great filter ahead of us, I think it's likely it will be quite near in time. It should happen before a species is well established in their star system, otherwise surely the window for galactic colonization in some manner will have been opened far enough for some to escape it (unless there is some vast technological leap required compared to colonizing the home system that I am unaware of, beyond the different scales in time and space?).
If we assume a great filter exist which has not yet come to pass, then we must also accept that the probability of us passing through it is extremely slim. So, a filter that happens between where we are now and the colonization of the star system, with a very high extinction-rate. I don't think nuclear technology or "total war" represent a high enough rate to be a good candidate, but it leads into another scenario - any species that have reached the nuclear age will have a keen interest in particle physic research. The theory is then that there exists an incredibly dangerous phenomenon related to particle physics research, and that this phenomenon is virtually impossible to infer with any certainty beforehand. This would in effect represent a keyhole only the most absurdly cautious of species will pass through (the ones not likely to become galaxy exploiters). In this scenario there is room for threats we think we know about, like surprisingly persistent black holes, or "unknown unknowns" out of left field. It seems scientists are convinced indeed that there is no possibility of persistent black holes :-) Assuming this phenomenon will only wreck the planet itself, then for it to be The Great Filter, it should consistently occur rather early, before a species is likely to have time to develop the technology to establish mature and self-sufficient industrial complexes and colonies in the rest of the star system.
This is a years-old post, but I'm reading Steven LeBlanc's "Constant Battles" and your "Alien War Nightmare" post linked to this, so I wanted to chime in on forager warfare. Foragers might seem too low-density to come in contact with others much, but that's only if you focus on remaining ones like the Eskimo, !Kung or Aborigines who live in marginal territories others don't want. When foragers dominated the Earth, that included more productive areas supporting larger populations. As a percentage of their population, a LOT of foragers die from inter-group conflict. The same is true for male chimpanzees, who are also foragers and likely resemble our ancestors in their most ancestral environment.
Also, on wives being treated as property: my understanding is that Australian Aborigines (on the one continent that never developed agriculture) have a gerontocracy where older men have multiple wives.
Yes, you'd have your anti-berserker capabilities range to outside of your sphere. But even if a berserker gets through it'll get spotted and intercepted (you'll have defenses near your most important planets/bases too): after all, it has to get close to some important target before it can do any damage. If it tries to replicate inside your sphere or near it then that increased activity (heat output) will make it easier for you to detect the coming threat.
Most of all your doctrine will be to delay berserkers because in most scenarios you can (re)build your defensive capabilities faster than they can receive reinforcements.
Is that how the math works out? I'd think that since the vast majority of the volume is empty, increasing volume would be a liability and become more and more disproportionately expensive. But, since defending unoccupied of the sphere of influence isn't necessary, ultimately I agree with you.
That assumes detection is easy. But it is easy to make detection easy if your occupied territory is smaller than your Anti-berserker sphere of influence, which is what made me realize I was being silly and attempt to delete that comment.
A fGF needs to be nearly universal across all intelligent aliens that become space-faring, to explain the great silence.
But even if the Predator-Prey extinction trap somehow were universal across all alien races, at least some should have lasted long enough to send self-replicating machines out into the galaxy.
If you control your sphere then defense is always relatively easy: a lone berserker (or at least only a small number of them, given the vastness of space) enters your sphere after traveling for god knows how long, you have 20 anti-berserkers (cheaper than berserkers because they don't have to travel as far/fast) converge on it immediately, plus nearby resources and production facilities to build a million more anti-berserkers.
If you simultaneously grow fast in a large sphere, and if you in fact mostly control that sphere, then the probes they send from inside can't do that much damage, and the probes they send from outside take too long to get there. Once you have densely colonized a large volume you win on defending the surface area vs huge volume resources to draw upon.
Urgh. I realized I was being dumb and tried to delete this comment, but instead the website removed the comment from my control. Just ignore this.
Not sure what I was thinking there.
The option you mentioned as a possible end to the griefer scenario, clearing out a large region of space surrounding one's location, seems to have big weaknesses. If you begin to clear out a large region of space then you are letting others know your approximate location. They could send probes of their own at you, or fling a star or two in your direction.
Now I'm worrying about interstellar false flag attacks.
Empires come and go... (historically they've also been prone to civil wars that weakened them until they could no longer defend against external enemies, external enemies who may consist of seceded parts of the empire itself).
Doesn't this end when random variation in predation abilities produces a super predator who takes everything? The predators you're describing seem like foragers, wandering around for prey. But the really good predators would probably use threat of predation to extract tributes, more like farmers who cultivate their prey, a.k.a. empire.
Btw, this post touches on a current ecological issue. The diminishing returns on hunting rare prey explains why some species have been critically endangered for decades without fully going extinct (wrongly convincing some people that environmental activists were just being alarmist). Tigers are probably a good example: the remaining wild tigers are so widely dispersed that poachers can't find them anymore, the species survives because it has the ability to find mates across huge distances (species that do not have this ability eventually go extinct when dispersed, but depending on lifespan this can take decades, even centuries when there is still sporadic mating, to current humans this can give the impression of such species doing ok).
The Oort cloud is said to be about a light-year in radius. And I don't think the cutoff is all that sharp. Shall we take bets on how big the cloud around Alpha Centauri is?
For the predator-prey scenario to play out in a time of solar colonization and great scientific progress then some weird regressive irrationality need to win out, like superior but defunct runaway constructs, artificial mind-virus pandemics, or some weird evolution of humans. It's also a scenario local in scope, so not really "The Great Filter", just one of many possible outcomes some species might face.
Assuming the galaxy is in fact unexploited and clear of griefers, and assuming there is a single great filter ahead of us, I think it's likely it will be quite near in time. It should happen before a species is well established in their star system, otherwise surely the window for galactic colonization in some manner will have been opened far enough for some to escape it (unless there is some vast technological leap required compared to colonizing the home system that I am unaware of, beyond the different scales in time and space?).
If we assume a great filter exist which has not yet come to pass, then we must also accept that the probability of us passing through it is extremely slim. So, a filter that happens between where we are now and the colonization of the star system, with a very high extinction-rate. I don't think nuclear technology or "total war" represent a high enough rate to be a good candidate, but it leads into another scenario - any species that have reached the nuclear age will have a keen interest in particle physic research. The theory is then that there exists an incredibly dangerous phenomenon related to particle physics research, and that this phenomenon is virtually impossible to infer with any certainty beforehand. This would in effect represent a keyhole only the most absurdly cautious of species will pass through (the ones not likely to become galaxy exploiters). In this scenario there is room for threats we think we know about, like surprisingly persistent black holes, or "unknown unknowns" out of left field. It seems scientists are convinced indeed that there is no possibility of persistent black holes :-) Assuming this phenomenon will only wreck the planet itself, then for it to be The Great Filter, it should consistently occur rather early, before a species is likely to have time to develop the technology to establish mature and self-sufficient industrial complexes and colonies in the rest of the star system.
That is the "griefer" scenario Stross mentioned.
Perhaps similarly, maybe the reason there appears to be a Great Filter is that smart civilizations are hiding from everyone else?