What's NASA Up To And Other Space Stuff

[Steely Glint]

We have nuclear weapons because they're cheaper/easier than the alternatives, including sending a sword wielding army in to slaughter everyone. I'm not sure your example's significantly different from what I'm saying.

But that's not why we have them. To understand why we have them, especially when almost everyone agrees they are, basically, awful you'd have to first understand the nature of modern warfare, the interdependent nature of modern societies and the understand the geopolitical context of the cold war that lead to us building so many of them; none of which would be readily apparent to a medieval dude just trying to understand the things in isolation.

Likewise, it is not possible to make a proper cost-benefit analysis of the spess aliens building dyson spheres in the constellation of cygnus but not rocking up to Sol in the F/SLT ships because we don't know the political, technological and cultural context in which those decisions were made.

We don't know, but we do know they're not in this system so there must be some reason for that. We also know they've not left similar evidence in any of the other systems we've been looking at. By starting construction on a Dyson sphere or Matrioshka brain or whatever 1500 years ago, we can tell that it is not due to a lack of capability, which means there is another reason.

Again; millions upon millions of known stars. Billions more unknown; they could be doing this all over the place and there's no reason to assume we would have noticed. They're not in this system, and there must be some reason for that? The reason is that within 2000 ly of earth there are approximately 80 million stars. Enough to keep anyone busy for a mere few thousand or even single digit million. Even dyson sphere builders.

This is basically your medieval guy looking at the bombs and saying "Bombs are pretty complicated, but swords are pretty easy, but they use bombs instead of swords, therefore bombs must be superior in some way." Further, this medieval guy could also conclude that just building bigger and longer swords isn't going to get him very far in the art of war.

Swords are a thing the medieval guy already knows about. We're comparing FTL travel with stellar scale mega-structure construction; we don't know the technical specifics of either, we don't even know

Even at STL, that we caught them in the perfect window, where we're close enough to their expansion zone to see them building dyson spheres in their core worlds, but far enough from their expansion zone that they haven't gotten here yet - out of all the billions of years they and we could have existed, that's pretty unlikely.

Of all the infinite number of possible situations that could exist, and given one of them is pretty unlikely.

Consider; all the millions of years humanity existed before we discovered this star and all the millions of years of years it will (hopefully) continue to exist after we figure out that, no false alarm, it's actually just space dust; how astronomically unlikely is that you and I both happened to have been born within that tiny window, and given all the millions of humans who rich enough to afford the internet we both *just happened* to both be interested enough in computer games made by one particular company to end up on the Atari forums, interested enough in current affairs to move to community chat and then invested enough in the community to make the move over to here? If you think about it, this very conversation is almost astronomically improbably, and yet here it is.

Even if it takes them millions of years to colonize the galaxy, that's still the blink of an eye cosmically, and we're still deep in the unresolved Fermi paradox. If colonization happens at all, then us being the second race in the galaxy to be ever be capable of it, and also existing this late in the game but exactly in the window between when the first race starts and finishes, that's all a pretty massive coincidence*. I mean, the probability is non-zero, but it's not very large.

I have no answer to this. But then, there is no good answer to the Fermi paradox, I haven't heard one that doesn't contain an unacceptable level of bullshit & assumptions.

Obviously, we're missing something. I have no idea what. Better minds than mine have no idea either, soooo

The most likely solution to this if that actually is some kind of megastructure is that sapient alien life is actually fairly common, so the fact that we exist in the window necessary to see these other guys isn't that incredibly improbable. Further, colonization must be an inferior option to building whatever it is they're building for some reason, otherwise somebody would already be here and we wouldn't have spent so long gazing into an apparently empty cosmos.

Trouble is, you build one of these things and then you sit around for a few million years and then what? Stop expanding, stop growing? Eventually you're going to want another one. The problem doesn't go away.

If you grant these two things, we can then take it further and say that the colonization throttle is unlikely to be ethical or some sort of 'prime directive'. If it were, it would only take one race (of the many that have existed) to cheat and behave unethically for the universe to no longer match our observations. So the throttle is most likely logistical or engineering based. It's probably safe to say it's not engineering based - we could build a generation ship within the next fifty years if we really really wanted to. Which leaves logistical - they don't do it because doing this other thing is just a better use of their resources (broadly defined). The same reason we drop bombs instead of sending in men with swords - we certainly could do the latter, but the former is so much cheaper, safer, and more effective that it would be stupid to do so.

Like all solutions to the Fermi paradox this seems to rely on a uniformity of motive that I just find profoundly unconvincing.

*edit: Other possibility, maybe they are the first race, but we're not the second. This would be much more likely than them being first and us second. This possibility ought to be terrifying.

If it's a clear night and you're in the Northern hemisphere, if you find Vega then imagine a line between Vega and Deneb, then about 75% of the way along the line you'll find the patch of sky we're talking about. You can't see the star because it's too faint but you're looking in the right direction.

Next clear night I want everyone reading this to go out, find that patch of sky stare and it for a few moments and then say, out loud, "Don't try any shit"

Just to be on the safe side.

[Wraith]

But that's not why we have them. To understand why we have them, especially when almost everyone agrees they are, basically, awful you'd have to first understand the nature of modern warfare, the interdependent nature of modern societies and the understand the geopolitical context of the cold war that lead to us building so many of them; none of which would be readily apparent to a medieval dude just trying to understand the things in isolation.

In other words, they are superior in some way. It's easier than trying to maintain an army of swordsmen large enough to guarantee annihilation of our enemies within quick striking distance of them. You don't need to understand why they're superior to understand that they are.

Likewise, it is not possible to make a proper cost-benefit analysis of the spess aliens building dyson spheres in the constellation of cygnus but not rocking up to Sol in the F/SLT ships because we don't know the political, technological and cultural context in which those decisions were made.

It's unlikely that they're the first. If there are two sapient races, then there are almost certainly many. If the reasons are political or cultural, then you need to assume that all races have political or cultural reasons not to do it. I consider this unlikely, but if it were true there's no reason to assume we'll be any different at that stage. The difference between this and assuming that there is some logistical reason not to do it is negligible right now.

Again; millions upon millions of known stars. Billions more unknown; they could be doing this all over the place and there's no reason to assume we would have noticed. They're not in this system, and there must be some reason for that? The reason is that within 2000 ly of earth there are approximately 80 million stars. Enough to keep anyone busy for a mere few thousand or even single digit million. Even dyson sphere builders.

This is that massive coincidence again, though. On further reflection of the likelihood of this, I can only pray that this isn't the case. For colonization to be worth doing, and for it to not have happened until now, and for sapient life to be so common that two races could coexist so close in time and space, it won't matter how far off their expansion horizon is from us - we are almost certainly thoroughly fucked. The Great Filter will be ahead of us, and it is going to be angry.

Of all the infinite number of possible situations that could exist, and given one of them is pretty unlikely.

Consider; all the millions of years humanity existed before we discovered this star and all the millions of years of years it will (hopefully) continue to exist after we figure out that, no false alarm, it's actually just space dust; how astronomically unlikely is that you and I both happened to have been born within that tiny window, and given all the millions of humans who rich enough to afford the internet we both *just happened* to both be interested enough in computer games made by one particular company to end up on the Atari forums, interested enough in current affairs to move to community chat and then invested enough in the community to make the move over to here? If you think about it, this very conversation is almost astronomically improbably, and yet here it is.

This is solved by a version of the anthropic principle. Our conversation here is nothing special. I could be having a similar conversation on some other forum, or with someone else. If you weren't here, I'd probably be doing something equivalent with EyeKhan. Right now, other people besides the two of us are probably having similar conversations. Nothing is special about what we're doing right now, so it's a believable outcome.

The same cannot be said about the idea that they exist, are colonizing the galaxy, but haven't gotten to us yet. That would place both us and them in a privileged position in the history of the galaxy. It's not impossible, but it's extremely unlikely, only more so because the galaxy has been capable of supporting life such as our for billions of years before now.

The situation can only be resolved by assuming there's nothing special about our situation. We aren't privileged. If we had existed at some other time in the the past or next billion years instead, or in some other galaxy, we would still be able to look out and see most stars empty, with a scant handful stars having megastructures built around them. The only way this can be true (if that is a megastructure we're seeing), the only way to maintain our unprivileged status, is if interstellar colonization just isn't a route civilizations go down, for whatever reason. Otherwise, the universe doesn't meet what we should expect as unprivileged observers.

Trouble is, you build one of these things and then you sit around for a few million years and then what? Stop expanding, stop growing? Eventually you're going to want another one. The problem doesn't go away.

Maybe you don't need more? Or maybe one will keep you for an extremely long period of time? If you slow expansion down so galactic colonization takes billions rather than millions of years, that might also work. In this case, we should be able to spot other stars with similar structures being built around them, because it's very unlikely that they're the only ones that far along.

Like all solutions to the Fermi paradox this seems to rely on a uniformity of motive that I just find profoundly unconvincing.

It actually doesn't, the point of it is to escape uniformity of motive. If galactic colonization is not merely inconvenient, but has intractable problems of some sort which throttle it, societal motivations don't matter - it's just not going to happen much, or maybe ever depending on the nature of the problems and how parallel universal sapient development is. One possible solution is that building something in your own star system is just so superior to colonizing the galaxy that nobody ever really gets too far from their home systems before just doing that instead.

The bottom line is that if that actually is an alien civilization building a megastructure, their existence implies that it is very unlikely that interstellar colonization is something we'll ever actually do, even if we don't understand the reasons yet. If we look closer and find out that they are colonizing systems even while building this thing, that they're expanding outwards in a manner consistent with eventual galactic colonization within the next hundred million years or so, then we'd better hope that galactic colonization actually is a terrible idea and we just managed to spot them before they figured it out themselves and stopped completely. Otherwise that implies that there's a very high probability that oh shit oh shit oh shit fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.