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But how would we know if a probe had come and mined a bunch of asteroids (or sucked Mars dry, or something) some millions of years ago, then moved on?
Well there are two motivations why extraterrestrials might leave unmistakable evidence:
First, they might want to leave a message for the sake of connecting with any intelligent species that might arise. (This would be trivially inexpensive to do and it's certainly something we humans have attempted to do.)
Second, there's a lot of free energy and resources lying around in our solar system. Why leave that on the table?
For the sake of discussion, let's say that an extraterrestrial species is "Unobtrusive" if for whatever reason it leaves no messages and leaves our solar system largely intact.
Ok, if the likelihood of intelligent life developing is high enough that likely to produce a Renaissance Italy level civilization 150 light years away, it follows that (probably) there have been thousands if not millions of intelligent extra-terrestrial species who have had the opportunity to send a probe and/or a colonization wave through our solar system. And it seems highly unlikely that every last one of them would have been Unobtrusive.
If...
The thing is that all of this stuff depends on exactly which values you wanna plug into the Drake equation -- any options between "we are alone" and "spacefaring intelligent life is pretty rare but not that rare" seem on the table based on what we can observe.
The assumption that Von Neumann probes would necessarily/likely be maximally grabby paperclip maximizers does seem like reasoning from sci-fi to me -- like, would you design a system that just goes around raping every star system it encounters? Why would the aliens?
Well the scenario I was addressing involved a Renassaince Italy level civilization located 150 light years from Earth. In that situation, it's reasonable to infer that intelligent life is not rare at all (for any reasonable definition of "rare.")
On the other hand, let's suppose the likelihood of intelligent life developing is such that any galaxy has a 1/2,000,000 chance of developing intelligent life. In that case, one would expect about a million intelligent species in the observable universe. Which is quite a lot, but one would reasonably expect the nearest intelligent species to be so far away so as not to see any evidence of them in our solar system.
So if "pretty rare but not that rare" means about 1 million species in the observable universe, then yes, I agree with you. That's on the table.
In other words, the Fermi argument is pretty strong for the proposition that we are alone in the Milky Way, but much weaker for the argument that we are alone in the observable universe.
I can think of a couple reasons:
First, it's reasonable to assume that, just like us, they are the product of an evolutionary process which rewarded organisms for being "maximally grabby" as you put it. And in fact, history shows that people are pretty grabby. (Keep in mind that all it takes is for one faction of one species to decide to be "maximally grabby.")
Second, a lot of hypothetical species (or factions within species) are going to realize that they need to be "maximally grabby" as a defensive measure. If they don't do it, they are vulnerable to another species (or faction) which does do it.
The argument sort of shifts though -- "sending probes to explore is normal, we've even done it" moves to "sending probes for conquest/destruction is normal, anyone would do it".
Exploratory probes do seem pretty likely for sufficiently advanced civilizations, but unless the probes are remarkably inefficient at replicating you should be able to explore the galaxy pretty effectively without harvesting every scrap of energy/matter from every star system you visit -- granted on a long timelime, but I think we are stuck with that anyways. (thanks Einstein)
A lack of deliberate conquest/destruction type probes seems to point equally well towards "space is hard and there's not really much point in conquering/destroying other star systems because they are too far away to be either useful or harmful" as "everyone would obviously want to destroy/conquer anywhere in the galaxy that might produce a species that could compete with them (on massive time scales)".
Historical examples of grabbyness involved a lot more "grabbing stuff will make you super rich" than "you will probably never even know what you've grabbed; better destroy it just in case somebody else grabs it".
I think maybe you misunderstood my point. I'm saying that exploring, conquering, and extracting resources is pretty normal. That's what most species do if they can.
I agree, but the question is whether every last species would choose to be Unobtrusive. To both (1) not leave any messages; and (2) to not ruthlessly extract all available resources. I tend to doubt it.
"Destroy" isn't quite the right word. Destruction (in a general sense) is of course the natural consequence of aggressive grabbing.
I understand your point perfectly -- my point is that if only the first of those is something that a species can do vis a vis space exploration, which certainly seems to be the case, then they will not do the other things.
If your Von Neumann probes are star-hopping around the galaxy, they really only need enough resources from the solar system to hop on to the next few stars in your path -- where they will do it again. That doesn't seem like a lot of resources, and burning more resources than you need is wasteful, which is also something that most species are evolved not to be.
Well can we agree that (1) it would cost essentially nothing to have your Von Neuman probes lay claim (or attempt to lay claim) to the solar system; (2) it would cost essentially nothing to leave messages for future inhabitants; and (3) in a lot of cases, there is a good chance that a colonization wave would follow behind the probes?
(3) is probably the main source of disagreement -- I think interstellar colonization attempts are highly improbable due to the physics of the thing. (as mentioned, with possible edge cases where a highly advanced civilization has literally no alternative but to flee their home system -- seems improbable too though?)
Given ¬3, (1) no longer makes sense either -- why would you "lay claim" to something that you can never visit?
Messages... yeah maybe. I guess you need to include the odds of us finding the messages? Messages that are literally impossible to miss (on a millions of years timescale) would also be resource intensive to produce, and some black obelisks on Mars might very well exist! (or else your probes are designed to shoot some proto-DNA onto habitable planets and we are the message, of course)
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