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Grabby Aliens is a Terrible Model
My understanding of Robin Hanson’s Grabby Aliens argument is as follows:
Over time, most of the universe will be claimed by Grabby Aliens, leaving less and less room for other alien civilizations
Therefore, most civilizations in the universe will appear near the beginning of the universe, before the Grabby Aliens are so visible and powerful
Therefore, it’s no mystery that we find ourselves near the beginning of the universe, without other aliens in sight
Please let me know if I’ve misunderstood his argument--I’m sure I’ve lost some detail in this summary but the gist of it is that based on outside view it makes perfect sense that aliens are fairly common but that they’re not visible to us yet.
However, this is obviously the wrong perspective through which to view the issue. The outside view works on a civilizational level, yes. If we accept all premises, it makes sense that most civilizations would find themselves “early” in a cosmic sense. But on an individual level, which I’d argue is the much more relevant perspective, the vast, vast majority of individuals should be born into Grabby Alien civilizations.
So my argument is:
If Grabby Aliens exist, in time most of the universe will be claimed by grabby aliens of one sort or another
If at least one Grabby Alien civilization doesn’t immediately succumb to AI or a similar thing, the incredibly vast majority of sentient beings will be born under Grabby Alien rule
It doesn’t matter what the distributions of early civilizations is, because how individuals are born is a more relevant, powerful, and potentially accurate use of Outside View
Therefore, the Fermi Paradox has not been resolved; it’s just been transmuted into the question “Why weren’t we born into a Grabby civilization at its peak?”
(optional) If going by the outside view, I personally find it more likely that we actually have been born into a Grabby civilization, and are being fooled into thinking we’re alone. This is highly speculative though.
There are of course large weaknesses to using the outside view at all, but I’m just trying to use all the same premises that the original argument did. It frustrates me to see so many rationalists essentially dismiss the issue as solved now that a prominent rationalist has come up with an argument against it, when the argument is so weak.
I’d love to hear what you guys think.
I think the question here isn't "should you, as a person expect to be born into a mostly-empty universe", but rather, "should you expect to be part of a race that has mostly conquered the universe without resistance from other aliens".
In some ways I think people are insufficiently paranoid about the implications of this question, though. I think it's likely that, a few millennia from now, we'll realize that life can be roughly modeled as
And you can kind of use this to break things down into four options.
If humanity is the first species and FTL travel is possible, then we're going to settle the entire universe with no resistance.
If humanity isn't the first species and FTL travel is possible, then this may simply be a paradox; we haven't been settled, therefore our assumptions are wrong.
If humanity is the first species and FTL travel isn't possible, then we will expand in a sphere, roughly at light speed, and eventually meet up with other species that will be less advanced than us and therefore pose little threat.
If humanity isn't the first species and FTL travel isn't possible . . . then we live in a universe full of species-spheres rapidly expanding, and we will be absolutely crushed when we encounter the first one of them.
This is concerning.
I have nothing to add to the original point, but here's my hobby horse when it comes to interstellar civilizations: As far as we know, you can't go faster than light or even nearly as fast by any practical means, and you can't freeze and thaw people. Assuming that interstellar business isn't entirely relegated to robots and computers, because that would be narratively boring, we're looking at generation ships and a lot of generations. There will need to be social technology, or just technology, to keep people dozens or hundreds of generations down the line aligned with the plans and values of those who launched them. It doesn't matter much whether this refers to colonization or trade or conquest or diplomacy - how would an actual biological species or civilization ensure that the people it sends out to other stars remain even remotely committed to the cause that sent them? And then, how do you ensure that the people who do the sending don't change so much that by the time the mission comes back with whatever returns are expected, they're no longer able to meaningfully interact with them?
I posit that any spacefaring biological civilization will be conformist and conservative to an extreme and probably unimagined degree, by necessity.
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'Universe' is big.
Positing galactic colonization, sure. Otherwise..
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One possibility I never see represented is that maybe capping out on tech isn't actually that hard on these timescales. Maybe once you get into the rapidly expanding bubble phase everyone has the same tech and there is some defensive advantage asymmetry that robs the first mover of an advantage.
Why shouldn't the rapidly expanding sphere thing apply to earth scale conflict? Even with vast technological supremacy the west has repeatedly be unable to conquer parts of the globe it would quite like to conquer. The future of all universal species might just be infinite multi-polar cold wars, or if I dare to dream, Star Trek style interspecies cooperation.
Keep in mind that in this analogy, we're probably the Sentinelese.
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Theoretically, civilizations which can manage interstellar travel would be locked in MAD because if you can accelerate a ship to relativistic speeds and decelerate it into orbit, you can accelerate a very large rock into relativistic speed to crash into the planet and wipe out all life therein with no possibility of defense, orbital mechanics being generally well understood.
If you have an interstellar civilization based around some manner of FTL travel, whatever exotic technology is in use would also probably provide weapons of mass destruction- Alcubierre drives as currently understood could generate a massive gamma ray burst fairly easily, and that’s assuming that Alcubierre drive operation can’t be used to directly tear planets apart. A civilization which can build krasnikov tubes or artificial wormholes can also probably launch relativistic kinetic weapons, the energy requirements to build the other end being if anything more impressive.
I had considered going into the details of why defense might have some asymmetry, like maybe it's pretty easy to put a dead man's switch type deal that makes a defended star system unusable if threatened. Really it doesn't seem like the kind of thing we'd be able to predict with current day physics knowledge, maybe dark matter can be used as a relativistic shield of some sort.
A relativistic bombardment would also make a planet unusable on less-than-geologic timescales, right? It seems like it should(although a gamma ray burst probably wouldn’t, even if it requires a planet get re-terraformed). No doubt sci-fi ftl changes the equation because faster than light sensors can give much more of an early lead time on relativistic bombardments, but any kind of shielding that works against, say, a dinosaur killer at .7 C is beyond physics as commonly understood.
I have to admit, I now kind of want to see the motte coming up with a hard sci-fi universe of its own centered around some kind of interstellar Cold War.
The dark forest looms large in such a discussion, but I do think it got the game theory wrong. I think in general in the space future a lot of civilization leaves the gravity wells and never returns.
Why? Everything a civilization needs is in gravity wells- energy, materials, resources. Given interstellar travel times it makes more sense to stick near a source of fuel and materials when you can.
Gravity wells will be used and mined but they're too easy of targets. And the friction of escaping the well to trade is going to be very important.
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Incorrect.
Moldbug has a piece on this which I was just reading the other week but now can't retroactively find (the wonders of living life on incognito mode), so you'll have to excuse my paraphrasing of the argument:
The West is perfectly capable of conquering e.g. Afghanistan. Because the West has nuclear weapons and Afghanistan doesn't. A handful of hydrogen bombs, and there are literally no Afghanis left alive to stop you from taking their clay and holding it in perpetuity. The West's failure to conquer Afghanistan is because the West self-restricts itself from deploying its high tech, not because the high tech ain't up to the job.
That being said, while I object to your analogy I think your overall point is sound. I can believe that after a couple more thousand years there will just be no more hyoeradvanced applied physics left to discover; the tech tree of Reality may indeed have an end that soon.
TBH, the west doesn’t have much difficulty conquering things it has strong reasons to conquer. Afghanistan was a failure because we didn’t think it was worth it to keep fighting. Same with Vietnam.
I think what you and @Butlerian are missing is that this is very much how you defend yourself successfully from stronger foes: you turn any fight into a quagmire and retain levels of enthusiasm for wanton slaughter of invaders that they cannot sustain.
The West can not conquer Afghanistan. Not because it lacks materiel, but because it lacks the will and it would destroy western society to try to manifest it. Vociferation about how you could have wiped your adversary off the map if only they didn't use successful tactics are always vacuous, whatever the tactics.
War is the art of making the enemy do what you want. Not of having the best weapons.
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I think technological limits could drastically change the shape of the results.
For example, if offensive technologies are really easy and defense is really hard, then you might get a MAD sort of truce.
If creation of valuable resources is easy there might be no benefit to seizing a bunch of solar systems.
If information and entertainment become the most valuable/scarce resources then you'd have a situation where older civilizations foster and grow new ones.
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The second claim doesn't follow from the first. The thing about universe is that it's vast and lack of FTL will immensely slow expansion on a galactic scale. For a "rapidly expanding sphere" to get far, the expansion has to actually be fast and last long enough before the civilization collapses (from galactic scale expansion perspective). Neither of these two are in any way set in stone.
It doesn't have to be very fast, because geological timescales are so large.
Consider colonization of the milky way.
The width of the galaxy is 100,000 light years. Let's say some civilization travelled at .0001 the speed of light between stars (the fastest man made probe is travelling at .0005 the speed of light) . And on average they had to stop every light year to build up, grow crowded, and then expand outward again. These stops take them 1000 years.
It would take them 200 million years to colonize the galaxy if they started at the very edge. Which is a long time for an individual, but short on geological timescales. If Earth2 on the opposite side of the galaxy had dinosaurs with a space program at the same time we had dinosaurs, then they would have already arrived here before humans evolved.
Yeah, but you obtain that result only because you're limiting your consideration to the Milky Way. Why so provincial? There are superclusters out there! Geological timescales are large, but the universe is seemingly infinitely vast. The total wealth a future civilization will be able to claim depends entirely on when they start and how fast they expand.
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Yeah, this is pretty much what I'm getting at; the scale is so huge that everything kinda rounds off to irrelevance.
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What would happen if two species-spheres formed at opposite ends of the Milky Way at exactly the same time? Would it be possible to negotiate a partition of the galaxy in half? Or would the equilibrium be so unstable that one side would inevitably win? Would the two species-spheres comingle to become like a single species?
We're talking about a multi-million-year timespan where things can happen, where a thousand-year (or perhaps even a hundred-year) gap is enough for total technological dominance. The chance that it happens at exactly the same time is negligable.
For all the other questions, I mean, maybe, we don't really know; the problem is that just one warlike species, with better technology, may be a rather unstoppable threat.
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