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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.
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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