Aren’t we already innudated by previous alien singularity fields? Why not?
Given life on other planets at least as advanced as ours (ergo, near their own singularities) occurring vast amounts of time before us yet sufficiently close for thier intergalactic probes to have reached, multiplied by whatever satistical factor you cate for to cover all such civilizations, etc, etc, etc, ipso facto, we’re filthy with previously occuring singularities.
Related Stories
Connect With Us
Subscribe by Email
Post a Comment
Get Our Newsletter
Debate Stats
Total Comments: (45)
Date Started: April 8, 2011 - 10:19 pm
Popular On The Hub
Martin Ford Asks: Will Automation Lead to Economic Collapse?
Written by: Aaron Saenz 716 days ago
Will the future be filled with cool technologies and endless opportunities or will our own creations lead to eventual doom? [...]
5 Axis Robot Carves Metal Like Butter (Video)
Written by: Aaron Saenz 605 days ago
Industrial robots are getting precise enough that they’re less like dumb machines and more like automated sculptors producing artwork. Case [...]
Designer Babies – Like It Or Not, Here They Come
Written by: Keith Kleiner 1009 days ago
Long before Watson and Crick famously uncovered the structure of DNA in 1953, people envisioned with both horror and hope [...]
Comments
We are indeed ‘innudated’ by aliens — perhaps this undefined term is perfect to describe the equally undefined nature of these singularity fields.
I can not help but think if singularity-level civilizations had come to Earth and seen human civilization in the past ten thousand years they might have stepped back and make a conscious effort to not interfere with us. Can you imagine how interesting our species development must be for a complete outsider to watch? It would be like if we had found a completely untouched, native Neanderthal tribe alive and well.
If we are talking a post-singularity civilization, meaning their members are more or less immortal and most likely able to hide their technology from us, or simply view us from far away, I think they might treat Earth like a great anthropological experiment. Even if life is common, finding a planet harboring life at the earliest time points of a possible track to a singularity must be relatively uncommon and extremely interesting to watch. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if we were the most popular reality TV show for another species: “Today on EARTH! humans begin to master the art of flight! Be sure to tune in next decade for our next episode of EARTH! where humanity takes baby steps into space!”
I find this question, and the grey goo scenario proposed by the scientist who invented carbon nanotubes completely absurd. If there was ever a time that civilization would destructively re-appropirate all matter it is now. and in fact when you are in a plane and look down to urban sprawls suffocating the entire planet, and all the destruction we do to the environment, driving animals to extinction, etc. that to me is the closest thing to such an event. If we evolve beyond our unsustainably materialistic consumerist oil-based economy and realise infintite human capital (i.e. proliferating far better virtually infinite invented solutions on the horizon to all of our problems) we would obviously move into a dyson sphere… but why would we even have to do that? snuffing out an entire sun seems a bit drastic. I am pretty sure that once beyond silicon based processors, and 3d molecular computing, light computing, quantum computing etc. and whatever else serves as the conduit to the intelligence explosion we find ourselves in we could all exist inside a 1ft X 1ft gamecube cabable of simulating infinite parallel universes which could serve as our home–completely unobtrusive to the “real” material world; which we could always teleport back into anyway.
anyways… one time i thought that maybe this exact topic is the reason we find astoundingly complex organic carbon chains of molecules in our space debris. the building blocks of amino acids, proteins, nucleic acids etc. exist in our own space debris right now in frozen comets, and before the earth even existed. obviously if there is some intelligent life in the universe there is some intergalactic/interdimensional law that prevents them from interacting with us, or it did in fact take 13.7 billion years for carbon based hyper intelligent androids to evolve from chaos… both are possible. maybe they can only sew the seeds of life for us/etc. minimal intervention… though i have since concluded that it’s just carbon’s remarkable ability to make 8 molecular bonds. anyways; regardless of our origins everything is just vibrating waves of energy and hence pretty magical nonetheless. enjoy life! and don’t be afraid to speak your mind when you see social injustice or a better solution.
You ARE the man! I think I love you. And yes, I am female!
;o)
The question is far from absurd. We have sent probes out to all the planets, sending probes to nearby stars is a matter of time, assuming we survive that long.
So if we haven’t seen probes or ambassadors from other planets it must mean 1) they’re all hiding on purpose, maybe some kind of galactic Prime Directive, 2) by the time they advanced to that state, they figured out how to go to extra dimensions that are easier to travel in, but are hidden to us, 3) their civilizations died and collapsed prior to that point.
1) seems unlikely, I would expect some kind of ‘rogue’ state out there at least to send probes to various places. 3) is plain depressing, could we really beat the odds if others haven’t? I like 2) myself. Much like radio communications – we expected radio waves to be emanating loudly from any civilization based on our advancement. Then we started using cable TV and internet for communications, and our EMF signature has actually dropped over time.
So what we expect to see may not be what advanced civilizations use. Perhaps invisible nanobots are their interstellar probes of choice. Our military is already moving in that direction.
to clarify; i agree that absurd was not the best word choice. no scientific question is absurd, no matter how irrelevant or inapplicable it seems. even if it doesn’t yield any evidence, we learn simply by questioning. in thinking about the same possibilities that you’ve address; which would prevent them from contacting us, i was trying to express and emphasize the possible/probable futility in asking this question. as we haven’t been explicitly contacted in a way in which humans can understand as far as we can tell–these reasons seem to be some of the only possible solutions. if we are inundated with previous post-alien singularities, so far it’s imperceptible to us.
Summarizing :
Current estimates are that it took about 3 billion years for life to random walk it’s way to the current level of complexity. Contrary to some belief, life DOES inevitably grow in complexity : in our current ecosystem, even the simplest extant organisms are quite complex machines.
Anyways, 3 billion years, and it required elements formed by supernova and other events for the life we see now to even be possible. Universe is thought to only be about ~13 billion years old.
1. So it IS possible that we are the first civilization within thousands or millions of light years.
2. Second, we rationally predict that the thing to do once we have the technology will be to expand life exponentially, gobbling up all matter to make more life. Thus we would grow in all directions exponentially, consuming all resources and making impossible to miss signs of our presence.
We assume that this is the best approach based on our current, flawed understanding of physics. We have only had a decent theory that is even semi-consistent for decades, and much of physics we still have NO ACCURATE MODELS FOR.
There MIGHT be vast realms we can’t detect, limits to complexity allowed by the simulation engine of the universe itself, alternate realities…all kinds of crazy things. So once we gain the power to create a singularity expansion, maybe a better approach will become clear once we have the increased intelligence such an expansion would grant.
3. Or the bad stuff. Maybe singularity tech causes every civilization that develops it to collapse. After all, we can build weapons that can ruin civilization much easier than we can build defenses against those weapons. Obviously a nuclear holocaust is much easier to cause than the tech needed to make it impossible. Soon it may be possible to build a bioweapon that would cause the extinction of humanity, but the defense against said weapon might be MUCH harder than creating the weapon itself. And so on.
Or I suppose there could be lurking destructive entities ready to kill noisy new civilizations…but I find that unlikely, because said entities would be much more efficient if they just occupied all available matter so that new civilizations could not form in the first place.
What’s the unequivocal evidence of a civilization that’s passed through the singularity? Would we know it if we saw it? Would it make sense to us?
Lightspeed could be a very real barrier. Folding space might be doable, but so expensive that you have to know you want to do it, establish point A and B and then do it. If another advanced, post singular civilization existed within the milky way it could still be a fraction of the 100,000 light years away. So lets call that 10,000 light years away to nearest. Even if there are a couple hundred of them in the milky way, and even if they jumped to singularity 2000 years before us, and moved to type 2 civilization, they would still be looking at us through a time lens of 8,000 years ago. So 6000 BC, would we even register as intelligent life on a galactic scale? No, we would be invisible. If other life exists it probably isn\’t like us, it probably grew up on moons of gas giants under an ice shelf, they probably resemble cuttlefish more than us. They would probably look for life on the type of planet they grew up on, we would look hot and dry and low pressure and high gravity to them (not somewhere life is likely).
But would we recognize a superintelligence if we saw it?
Much of my fiction is premised by the idea that we wouldn’t. Why not? Well, consider the ant. It is a very sophisticated being…quite successful…was here before we were and will remain when we’re gone.
But does it SEE us? Does it think about us as we think about it? As a living being? As an entity with its own goals and aims?
I submit that it doesn’t. First, I’m not sure it has concepts like “entity” and “living,” but, second, even if it did, I’m pretty sure it would see us as just big, warm, moving, something-or-others. And our constructions? Our cities and farms? No different from any mountain or field.
My point, then, is that once superintelligent beings were as far removed from us as we are from insects, they might be pretty much invisible to us.
Victor s.
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B005JT22MG
It could be that alien singularity fields simply haven’t reached us yet considering the billions of light years in distance between galaxies. Or maybe they have achieved pure bliss and have become so content that they have no interest in anything else. We would probably do the same thing. Imagine if technology gave us the ability to feel like we were on really good crack in the morning, having sex with supermodels while eating gourmet food in the afternoon, and at an amazing party for winning the lottery while everyone is on the best heroin and ecstasy ever in the evening, every day, and all this with no negative side effects. Who would give a damn about other civilizations.
to add to my comments this technology might even cause a civilization to stop innovating and expanding knowledge and power all together. Why continue when you reach pure bliss. And we might reach that before we build strong AI
I think that the most valuable goal of a civilization which has achieved singularity is to multiply its intelligence as rapidly as possible. Thus we would consume matter and energy in the surrounding universe and devote it to this purpose. Thus the greatest thing such a civilization could then hope for is to discover another singular civilization, and merge. The growth of knowledge would be exponential.
But it is hard to say whether a singularity type would be interested in us, I think they would be, potentially they could learn everything about us in a passing glance, and would be more interested in how we developed, rather then immediately integrating us. I wont even attempt to claim that we are the first, or if we are merely a simulation.
I think that we could get something from aliend singularity via SETI search and it is dangerous, because in could be describtion of AI which aim is self replication. See more in “Risks of SETI”
We’re probably about a few trillion basement universes away from the original universe, assuming there was an original. All this is unknowable, as far as I can tell, so we might as well assume we are in the “real” universe and not a simulation designed by a higher order civilization. Even though I believe that’s probably the case in all humility.
I think that there is a good chance that we are the first species to reach this level in this galaxy. Intergalactic travel seems unlikely, so we can probably restrict our view to just the Milky Way and not the entire universe (which probably contains plenty of advanced alien civilizations already).
When you think about things in terms of one galaxy, it seems much more likely that only one (or a small handful of) advanced civilization(s) will arise. However, pushing this even further is something like the anthropic principle.
Let’s assume that a post-singularity human society will go on to colonize the galaxy. This can be accomplished fairly quickly on a geological/evolutionary timescale (200,000 years should be plenty…which is about how long our species has existed). Doesn’t it make sense that this colonization process will disrupt the emergence of future alien civilizations? If this is true, then it makes sense that we are the first because whoever gets to this point first will prevent all their competitors from ever arising.
That’s not to say that there won’t be any sentient alien species. One possibility is that a more than one civilization will arise independently within the 200,000 year window of opportunity. If this is the case though, they are probably very distant (and/or still in their pre-industrial era) and we won’t meet them until we’ve expanded quite a ways. This also implies some mechanism to synchronize the emergence of galactic civilizations (or just “luck”).
However, most alien civilizations will likely be uplifted and “raised” directly by the main civilization. While it’s possible that the main civilization would let things take their natural course and invite new civilizations when they reach a certain point of maturity…it seems to me that it is more likely that the main civilization will exploit virtually all available resources. Since our solar system seems to be empty of alien artifacts and personnel, I doubt we are in this state ourselves.
It should also be noted that there’s no guarantee it will be us that goes on to become the main civilization. It could be that several civilizations self-destruct before one succeeds. It could also be that some civilizations turn inward and never widely colonize. We could be poised to enter into either position. The point is that the first expansionistic interstellar civilization will come to dominate the galaxy and prevent others from arising, which means that the galaxy will always seem devoid of alien civilizations from the perspective of all technological civilizations early in their history.
There’s one more possibility for us getting a late start though…we could be in a computer simulation…in which case the scenario we’re in could be anything, regardless of probability.
I wouldn’t have the hubris to say we’re the first in the galaxy!
The galaxy is pretty big, and we’re out on one arm in a localized ‘bubble’. We’re actually out in the sticks, lost in the boonies, as far as the galaxy is concerned. There could be hundreds of space-traveling civilizations in the galaxy but if there’s really no faster-than-light travel, they may very well not have the need to come out to our remote neck of the woods to check things out.
It might simply be that it is not possible to engineer conscious into a non-biological system.
lol
a biological system is a system is a mechanoid system that can be copy in a virtual environment
Do you used your so called intelligence ?
not everyone use it
An interesting point, followed by a non-sequitur. Math models may or may not ever achieve a one-to-one correspondence with the “real” physical world. To assume that something as profoundly mysterious as consciousness, let alone the true nature of so-called “physical” reality can be modeled is presumptuous.
Hmm, I’m kind of reminded of the theory of forms. But you know, I think matter and data will probably become equivalent/inseperable if singularity is ever reached.
An agent that makes intelligent decisions and actions can and has been engineered into non biological systems. whether it is conscious is debatable, however, It really doesn’t matter because what we really care about is the answers it gives to the problems we give it.
How about: Sporadic celestial events have been producing radiation spikes that have cooked away all life within vast areas of the galaxy. Only recently – the last few billion years, or so – have these events tapered off sufficiently for uncooked matter to gain intelligence.
That generally puts all intelligences on an equal footing in time, and would explain the lack of previous singularity signatures. Assuming equal developmental times, it puts the singularity ahead of any intelligences that share the galaxy. It would allow for the rise of intelligence as a natural step in the aging of a galaxy.
Good SciFi too, as it puts everyone on an approximately equal footing…
IMO the Drake equation is inaccurate because it doesn’t take time windows into account properly.
It takes time for intelligent life to evolve and that is not well encapsulated in a crude probability that doesn’t take into account how long the host star has left to live/ stay in a nice state after other prerequisite events.
Planets that are suitable for life to start in, are not nessecarily going to stay that way forever – fertile planets may “sour” – that may well have been the case for mars.
It might be that souring is very likely and so forces any life that starts, to start early in a planets history (if it doesn’t start early – the planet sours and it can’t start at all).
TL;DR we may be alone in the galaxy (but not in the universe).
Yes
the past, present and futur never has been OURS
I’m struck that some have argued that a post-singular civilization would either not notice us, or not be interested in us. I very much doubt that such a civilization would have any practical limits on either interest or attention.
Further, why would they limit themselves to a certain scale in viewing the universe? Not even twenty-first century humans do that. I doubt they would even differentiate scales in the same way we are forced to by our limited biology; I imagine that for them the range from sub-atomic to pan-galactic scales would be perceived as a fully integrated experience. Omnipotence is a hard thing for us to imagine.
Great points.
Omnipotence is a hard thing to imagine. That’s true. But what I find interesting is the idea that we can understand the motivations of another species, singularity notwithstanding. It’s quite possible that a species that attains a technological singularity will have very little interest in anything outside themselves. After all, if you can simulate the universe in a system you might find the myriad simulations so stimulating that you don’t have any interest in the outside world.
I think that it’s quite possible that a species in this situation would have little interest in us.
Why do husbands typically cheat on wives? Because they aren’t happy at home. Why would a post-singularity civilization have any desire to leave the planet that spawned them if they are capable of using their massive intelligence to fix all of the problems on their home planet?
What if we are the most advanced life in the universe? Unlikely, but possible. Given the geometric scale of probability of all the things having to happen simply to produce life and then for it to evolve the way it has, we could have won the cosmic lottery yet again.
Whether or not the speed of light is a hard cap, another possibility is that civilizations advanced enough to reach a technological singularity simply find themselves not caring enough about any distant civilizations to attempt to contact them. Why? Because they find there are much more interesting things going on at the nano/picoscale level. Perhaps singularity-reaching civilizations go inward rather than outward, undergoing a phase transition into other dimensions/universes where interstellar travel/communication is easier–”where the party is”–joining other civilizations who have reached their own singularities in their own unique ways. Why attempt to interact with a pre-singularity civilization, which to them is the equivalent of a rather boring and unengaging bacterium?
Of course, I have no scientific explanation of how exactly this would work or where such civilizations would go, it’s just a speculation. But we could find potential evidence of this by locating planetary-mass black holes orbiting potentially life-supporting stars.
many scientists are in fact thrilled to devote their entire lives to studying boring and unengaging bacterium. maybe we could teach them something that even they don’t know. why would they limit the scope of their virtually infinite intelligence/post-alien consciousness.
Jan Said: I think the lightspeed limit is an explanation for a lot of the questions about alien life. If there is no way around it, it automatically means intelligent life is limited to a very small section of their surrounding space.
A lot of the ideas being floated about space travel do not revolve around light-speed travel anymore – mostly they are considering the possibility of manipulation of spacetime through gravity control. Essentially, Space and time are linked in a fabric style structure. Manipulating gravity and directing it to specific place would pull the end point near – which a craft would then simply “hop” across. It’s the equivalent of taking a bridge across a river as opposed to driving up and over by three counties to get where you’re going.
I think the lightspeed limit is an explanation for a lot of the questions about alien life. If there is no way around it, it automatically means intelligent life is limited to a very small section of their surrounding space. Now let’s suppose the probability of intelligent life capable of reaching a singularity is about 1 per galaxy (this is what I get when estimating probabilities in the drake equasion). Then lets not forget we’ve been emitting radiosignals for a mere 100 years. Just enough to make it to our nearest stars but about 27000 years short of reaching the center of the milkey way, let alone another galaxy. This almost certainly means none of our signals have ever been picked up, since for all intents and purposes we are invisible to 99,9% of the universe. Now I also suspect a post singularity civilization would not randomly advertize their location (like we’ve naively been doing) but make contact selectively. Since we are not visible it makes sense we have not been contacted. Furthermore we might appear as nothing more than “underdeveloped” life even if our planet is recognized as a planet harbouring life. Don’t forget any aliens looking at earth see us as many years back as the amount of lightyears they are away! So given there is extraterrestrial post singularity life out there, according to me it will be trapped in small pockets of space a couple of thousand lightyears across at best at not interested in us until we show up as intelligent on their radar.
If we received some ‘message’ and could figure out where it came from, would we not have the intelligence to figure out the span of time it took to reach us? Would we not then try to imagine where they MIGHT be at this point in time? Of course we would so why wouldn’t they be capable of the same thought process and realize how much we might have advanced? I think they would be pretty confident that we were no longer at the ‘place’ we were when the message was first sent.
maybe they already exist in a shadow biosphere that we do not recognize. like mineral. maybe they exist in the double dark spectrum.
maybe our civilization or multi cellular creatures are just spikes that will even out over time. we should be looking for spikes, rather than long directional trends.
maybe were looking at the wrong scale of time or space. look at wild space vs tame space as one example of organization.
if we imagine that advance civs will be energy hungry and could time travel, then theyve already colonized the big bang and spread across the universe. etc.
It’s hard to picture a civilization going from Type 0 to Type 1 without some sort of respect for sentience, fairness, or at least a desire for win-win outcomes. In other words, some sense of ethics or morality. At the very least, one would think they’re not sadistic–less they destroy themselves or be destroyed by the AI they create.
Look back at human history. Until recently, it’s been fairly grim. So for nearly 200,000 years–when humans were raping, cannibalizing, and sacrificing each other–there was some race of super-intelligent, all-powerful enlightened aliens sitting on the sidelines, simply choosing not to help? The Holocaust? Rwanda? Being as smart as they are, they could have intervened in a way that would go unnoticed. That sounds more like an Old Testament god.
It doesn’t add. Maybe the have bigger fish to fry–like keeping the universe in existence, ensuring their own immortality, or something. But that’s even more speculative.
Then, when we look out to the stars, we see nothing…
In all likelihood, we are functionally alone–at least as intelligent creatures with a high degree of abstract thought and language.
In all likelihood, most life doesn’t make it to complex multicellular life.
Most complex life doesn’t lead to intelligent life capable of highly abstract thought.
And most intelligent life doesn’t make it to the “On Ramp for the Singularity.” It peters along at the tribal level before it get knocked out by an asteroid or god knows what else.
And the life that makes it to the On Ramp, likely ends up destroyed–either by an endogenous or exogenous force.
The other alternative is there is no way which to circumvent the speed of light or some other natural limit.
As intelligent creatures capable of complex emotions and abstract thought, we are likely alone.
This was the Drake question that went along with his very rough “equation” of how many intelligent species there might be in a galaxy. He asked “Where are they?”
We don’t see them because they’re too small, and/or we mistake them for something else. Kurzweil talks about powerful computers the size of blood cells. There’s no reason to think other civilizations will stop there. Whole generation ships of uploaded and digitally stored beings from other stars may be landing on Earth every day, but they might be what we call gamma rays. They could literally be in our bloodstreams, but they have no reason to let themselves be known. We can’t be sure this isn’t so until we can scan every subatomic particle of a human being and know its purpose.
If they’re aware of us at all, they’re pointing and laughing at how primitive we are.
those beings evolved beyond the current state of our species see no humor and take no joy in what they observe of us in this position within space-time.
they are alarmed and concerned, as an adult human would be to observe a child or infant that was in harm’s way.
furthermore, those who observe earth currently have been commissioned to do so by the beings more involved than they, who happened upon them in the same tradition.
it will be through their successfully guiding and preparing our species for our next phase in evolution that they will develop the properties required for they themselves to evolve to their next higher state of being, and so on into eternity.
this cycle is is infinite in its perpetuity, as are every possible condition of reality within the singularity of eternal existence.
forever doesn’t change, only the perceived state of its sentient components suffers the “illusion of change”.
in reality, you/we/i exist forever constant, in every moment you(i) have ever experienced.
Your post, and particularly the last paragraph, refreshingly resonates with my belief. Forever MEANS forever and that is what/who we are, eternal now, then and always. We are our own Creators our own God. We are all there ever was, is now or will be. Nothing ‘new’ can be given or taken away, only changed within the illusion.
And it’s ALL illusion, every last nano particle!
Civilizations are like fruits. Don’t pick until ripe
Could be but if they do exist what makes you think we’d have the ability to detect them or communicate with them. We wouldn’t have then necessary technology, or we would be like ants to them…not worth trying to talk to or even able to realize we were being talked to.
by any logic I can muster there should be aliens communicating all around us, and it is simply confusing to me that we haven’t been directly contacted. I’m inclined to believe that they’re not contacting us because they want to maintain our character in some way. when they do contact us, we will slowly learn about their technology to the point that we aren’t different from them, and then we wouldn’t be very interesting to look at.
Apologies, free cell phone input tool has no spell checker and I ain’t getting no brain implant (I think):
Aren’t we already inundated by previous alien singularity fields? Why not?
Given life on other planets at least as advanced as ours (ergo, near their own points of singularity) occurring vast amounts of time before us yet sufficiently close for their intergalactic presence to have reached us, multiplied by whatever statistical factor you like to cover all such civilizations, ipso facto, we’re filthy with previously occurring singularities.
This leads me to another hypothesis (any and all of which might be other’s but I’m not enough of a scholar to know or care to determine the difference at this point), namely that “they” (singular they?) don’t mind that we exist, nea, they absolutely love us. They maybe even went so far as to plant us here, encouraged our growth, sent us communications at the right time and place. They, in fact, may be our God.
all i have to say is It’s possible.