The universe looks dead. If it is actually teeming with ancient advanced life, why don’t any of them use all those resources we see? Yes, there might be other even more attractive resources we don’t see, but it still seems odd none specialize in using what we do see. Yes everything might be under the control of a unified collective, who agree on a preference to keep the universe looking dead. But pretty much any observation could be explained as due to a vast unified ancient power with an arbitrary preference to make the universe appear a certain way. (
If the federation has the weapon at some point hte potential rebels have it too.What if the rebels attack first? (afterall they should know they are a threat before the federation does)
You could potentially blast a buffer zone of dead systems, maybe millions of them.
I suggest at its limits war is more a MAD (mutually assued destruction) solution than a conquest one. At present we have nuclear weapons and many consider this MAD.
I imagine small robots that can engineer the conditions for somthing like a black hole to form if they get past the enemy defenses. Now send so many that it is impossible for the enemy to protect everywhere.
Now your rebel planets have an ace up their sleeves if the galactic federation decides to come for a fight.
> Thinking more traditionally, it seems really easy to drop rocks on planets in an inner solar system, and really hard to detect it being done maliciously.
It's hard without access to high-tech, but I was surprised to look at the various arguments in http://www.projectrho.com/r... (and especially the weapon/detector discussions in the spacewar section beginning with http://www.projectrho.com/r....
Apparently sensor technology is good enough that under plausible assumptions, planet-based defenders have huge advantages over spaced-based attackers - they can see the latter coming from almost indefinitely far off, can use far more powerful weapons (because spacecraft have serious heat-sink issues while planets are gigantic heat-sinks), and so on.
I sort of think offense is favored as well. For example, what are you supposed to do when the overlord tosses a black hole at your sun at 0.99c?
But this might just be because we don't know enough, and to beings a million years ahead of us the answer would be obvious.
Maybe emergent civs looking to be stealthy could intercept their emissions and send only the emissions of a non-emergent civ to any monitoring points. Picture a big projector screen on the Earth-emergent civ axis playing a movie of a dead solar system. :)
On super weapons, I was thinking of the "existential threats" from the great filter. If some weird physics experiment can destroy a solar system, it can also be a weapon. A consortium looking to enforce conformity can quietly sail a little satellite with its LHC someplace, and activate it.
Thinking more traditionally, it seems really easy to drop rocks on planets in an inner solar system, and really hard to detect it being done maliciously. It makes it hard to conquer an area so that you can populate it, but makes it easy to lord over.
You're right about the age of the universe, but it isn't the relevant time frame here because the speed of evolution will dictate the difference between convergence and diversity. We already have evidence that rapid evolution can happen within much less than 100.000 years, and this will be especially true after the imminent memetic takeover that you describe in one of your video essays on youtube. From then on, living phenotypes and sentient minds will be shaped by memetic evolution even more than they are already. The pace for this can become extremely fast.
Of course, there won't just be one colony 100.000 years away from the next; it's more likely that a regional continuum of many communicating star systems will come into being. So there will be faster memetic feedback systems, but they will be distributed and dynamic in a way that contradicts your premise of guided evolution by any coherent decision-making entity or governmental body.
If posthumanity wants guided evolution for ethical reasons, e.g. to create sentience within a well-defined state-space of high hedonistic value, it will need to find ways to overcome such limitations. One potential solution could be the launch of one non-mutation replication algorithm optimized for this ethical goal. Of course, if we already have an evolutionary equilibrium of some sort due to undetected alien life, then this is a moot point.
100,000 years is not such a long time - when you consider that the universe is billions of years old. I figure coordinating a galaxy-sized creature would be perfectly possible. I do not envisage FTL signalling, though.
>“use resources invisibly” it’s impossible to sneak around that, by definition. If you are visible, you aren’t sneaking.
It is still unstable, if using resources more visibly gives you an advantage that would make you stronger than another group, especially defensively, where an attacker attacking across interstellar distances would need an incredible (likely impossible) disparity of force for success.
If light speed is the only stumbling block, and we're asserting a universe peppered with intelligent beings needing to coordinate, but haven't detected them, how much should we adjust our belief that electromagnetic radiation is the only option for coordination?
billswift, if the AIs solve internal mathematical problems approximately, then a lower-fidelity approximate simulation might be good enough for coordination, and the resources used for AI minds might then have rapidly decreasing marginal utility. E.g. if the approximation algorithms at the core of my AI converge like O(1/sqrt(N)) and if I would normally solve one problem with 99.99% accuracy, then I can instead solve four similar problems with 99.98% accuracy.
This is something like how non-AIs handle coordination problems, too. My internal model of my coworkers needs only to be good enough to predict how honest each is, not what their favorite colors are.
Re: Super weapons. It sort of depends on whether defense or offense is dominant technically, in the limit. Since we have little idea of the technologies involved, it's hard to guess.
But if it turns out that defending star systems is easier than destroying them, then hegemony will be hard to enforce.
Conversely, if destroying star systems is easier than protecting them, the no-mutations got-everywhere-first entity would be hard to displace.
Although, in seriousness, if the consortium's rule is "use resources invisibly" it's impossible to sneak around that, by definition. If you are visible, you aren't sneaking.
Super weapons might keep people in line. If the response to visibly consuming a tenth of a star's output is that a planet buster gets sent to your world in a century, the permanent residents will enforce that rule.
gwern, that is the ultimate in expensive coordination. If the two are roughly equivalent, then simulating one would take all of the resources of the other.
Tim, I'm assuming a good probability that FTL signal transmission - let alone travel - will be physically impossible. If that turns out to be wrong, and you can jump your police drones to the other end of the galaxy within an hour, I would give credit to the possibility of a stable totalitarian galactic government. We could call that "central" despite the big numeric distances.
However, if FTL is impossible, and space colonization happens in such a way that openly evolving systems (societies, species, technological replicators...) build a "galactic federation" throughout such large distances, their evolution will greatly diverge. To the degree that they cooperate at all, they will get all the usual game theoretic problems of cooperation vs. defection, secrecy vs. transparency, shifting loyalities, military surprise attacks etc., and no one can directly enforce any central utilitarian plan by relying on everybody's respect for agreements.
It seems all but impossible to me to police defectors if messages need 100.000 years to reach them, and police drones need 300.000 years to enforce actual punishment. Of course, there would be game-theoretic equilibriums of sorts, but they will probably include enormous costs of hedonistic utility in comparison to a plan that is designed to flawlessly well-align the utility function of all players in the very long run to optimize subjective well-being (rather than fitness of competing agents).
As for intergalactic colonization: If the initial plan starts out with a sufficiently good understanding of the universe, the distributed, but non-mutating cooperative colonization algorithm could take into consideration leaps between galaxies. If that doesn't work due to the large distances involved, surely maximizing utility within one galaxy is still better than scaling war and torture throughout a whole supercluster.
A galactic federation probably wouldn't be very "central". It would be distributed. Successful galaxies will fairly clearly need galaxy-wide governments to coordinate the demanding task of spreading to other galaxies. It is not clear to me why you apparently think such things are not possible. Communication problems and delays across a mere 100,000 light years? That seems like peanuts.
Re: "for agreements to not use ample resources, there would remain great temptations to use such resources secretly, perhaps to support a breakout from the coordination regime."
You are talking about rebels against the galactic federation? Surely those have no chance - the federation will just crush them utterly.
If the federation has the weapon at some point hte potential rebels have it too.What if the rebels attack first? (afterall they should know they are a threat before the federation does)
You could potentially blast a buffer zone of dead systems, maybe millions of them.
I suggest at its limits war is more a MAD (mutually assued destruction) solution than a conquest one. At present we have nuclear weapons and many consider this MAD.
I imagine small robots that can engineer the conditions for somthing like a black hole to form if they get past the enemy defenses. Now send so many that it is impossible for the enemy to protect everywhere.
Now your rebel planets have an ace up their sleeves if the galactic federation decides to come for a fight.
> Thinking more traditionally, it seems really easy to drop rocks on planets in an inner solar system, and really hard to detect it being done maliciously.
It's hard without access to high-tech, but I was surprised to look at the various arguments in http://www.projectrho.com/r... (and especially the weapon/detector discussions in the spacewar section beginning with http://www.projectrho.com/r....
Apparently sensor technology is good enough that under plausible assumptions, planet-based defenders have huge advantages over spaced-based attackers - they can see the latter coming from almost indefinitely far off, can use far more powerful weapons (because spacecraft have serious heat-sink issues while planets are gigantic heat-sinks), and so on.
I sort of think offense is favored as well. For example, what are you supposed to do when the overlord tosses a black hole at your sun at 0.99c?
But this might just be because we don't know enough, and to beings a million years ahead of us the answer would be obvious.
Maybe emergent civs looking to be stealthy could intercept their emissions and send only the emissions of a non-emergent civ to any monitoring points. Picture a big projector screen on the Earth-emergent civ axis playing a movie of a dead solar system. :)
On super weapons, I was thinking of the "existential threats" from the great filter. If some weird physics experiment can destroy a solar system, it can also be a weapon. A consortium looking to enforce conformity can quietly sail a little satellite with its LHC someplace, and activate it.
Thinking more traditionally, it seems really easy to drop rocks on planets in an inner solar system, and really hard to detect it being done maliciously. It makes it hard to conquer an area so that you can populate it, but makes it easy to lord over.
You're right about the age of the universe, but it isn't the relevant time frame here because the speed of evolution will dictate the difference between convergence and diversity. We already have evidence that rapid evolution can happen within much less than 100.000 years, and this will be especially true after the imminent memetic takeover that you describe in one of your video essays on youtube. From then on, living phenotypes and sentient minds will be shaped by memetic evolution even more than they are already. The pace for this can become extremely fast.
Of course, there won't just be one colony 100.000 years away from the next; it's more likely that a regional continuum of many communicating star systems will come into being. So there will be faster memetic feedback systems, but they will be distributed and dynamic in a way that contradicts your premise of guided evolution by any coherent decision-making entity or governmental body.
If posthumanity wants guided evolution for ethical reasons, e.g. to create sentience within a well-defined state-space of high hedonistic value, it will need to find ways to overcome such limitations. One potential solution could be the launch of one non-mutation replication algorithm optimized for this ethical goal. Of course, if we already have an evolutionary equilibrium of some sort due to undetected alien life, then this is a moot point.
100,000 years is not such a long time - when you consider that the universe is billions of years old. I figure coordinating a galaxy-sized creature would be perfectly possible. I do not envisage FTL signalling, though.
>“use resources invisibly” it’s impossible to sneak around that, by definition. If you are visible, you aren’t sneaking.
It is still unstable, if using resources more visibly gives you an advantage that would make you stronger than another group, especially defensively, where an attacker attacking across interstellar distances would need an incredible (likely impossible) disparity of force for success.
If light speed is the only stumbling block, and we're asserting a universe peppered with intelligent beings needing to coordinate, but haven't detected them, how much should we adjust our belief that electromagnetic radiation is the only option for coordination?
billswift, if the AIs solve internal mathematical problems approximately, then a lower-fidelity approximate simulation might be good enough for coordination, and the resources used for AI minds might then have rapidly decreasing marginal utility. E.g. if the approximation algorithms at the core of my AI converge like O(1/sqrt(N)) and if I would normally solve one problem with 99.99% accuracy, then I can instead solve four similar problems with 99.98% accuracy.
This is something like how non-AIs handle coordination problems, too. My internal model of my coworkers needs only to be good enough to predict how honest each is, not what their favorite colors are.
Re: Super weapons. It sort of depends on whether defense or offense is dominant technically, in the limit. Since we have little idea of the technologies involved, it's hard to guess.
But if it turns out that defending star systems is easier than destroying them, then hegemony will be hard to enforce.
Conversely, if destroying star systems is easier than protecting them, the no-mutations got-everywhere-first entity would be hard to displace.
Heh.
Although, in seriousness, if the consortium's rule is "use resources invisibly" it's impossible to sneak around that, by definition. If you are visible, you aren't sneaking.
Super weapons might keep people in line. If the response to visibly consuming a tenth of a star's output is that a planet buster gets sent to your world in a century, the permanent residents will enforce that rule.
gwern, that is the ultimate in expensive coordination. If the two are roughly equivalent, then simulating one would take all of the resources of the other.
Tim, I'm assuming a good probability that FTL signal transmission - let alone travel - will be physically impossible. If that turns out to be wrong, and you can jump your police drones to the other end of the galaxy within an hour, I would give credit to the possibility of a stable totalitarian galactic government. We could call that "central" despite the big numeric distances.
However, if FTL is impossible, and space colonization happens in such a way that openly evolving systems (societies, species, technological replicators...) build a "galactic federation" throughout such large distances, their evolution will greatly diverge. To the degree that they cooperate at all, they will get all the usual game theoretic problems of cooperation vs. defection, secrecy vs. transparency, shifting loyalities, military surprise attacks etc., and no one can directly enforce any central utilitarian plan by relying on everybody's respect for agreements.
It seems all but impossible to me to police defectors if messages need 100.000 years to reach them, and police drones need 300.000 years to enforce actual punishment. Of course, there would be game-theoretic equilibriums of sorts, but they will probably include enormous costs of hedonistic utility in comparison to a plan that is designed to flawlessly well-align the utility function of all players in the very long run to optimize subjective well-being (rather than fitness of competing agents).
As for intergalactic colonization: If the initial plan starts out with a sufficiently good understanding of the universe, the distributed, but non-mutating cooperative colonization algorithm could take into consideration leaps between galaxies. If that doesn't work due to the large distances involved, surely maximizing utility within one galaxy is still better than scaling war and torture throughout a whole supercluster.
A galactic federation probably wouldn't be very "central". It would be distributed. Successful galaxies will fairly clearly need galaxy-wide governments to coordinate the demanding task of spreading to other galaxies. It is not clear to me why you apparently think such things are not possible. Communication problems and delays across a mere 100,000 light years? That seems like peanuts.
Re: "for agreements to not use ample resources, there would remain great temptations to use such resources secretly, perhaps to support a breakout from the coordination regime."
You are talking about rebels against the galactic federation? Surely those have no chance - the federation will just crush them utterly.