This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
What if Dyson Spheres are low-tech compared to the ultimate horizons of what's possible? Advanced countries leave forests to grow because we don't need firewood for fuel, it's too crappy to worry about. I think we should be looking for alien life in the remaining 95% of the universe's 'dark' matter/energy, the stuff that we can't understand. It's not sufficient to look through a mere 5% and say 'no aliens here, so no aliens anywhere'. That's like looking for gold in riverbeds only, not finding it and going home.
The general counter to those type of arguments ends up being then “why are there claims of us having their ships”. Then you need to make an argument “they have all this fancy tech that we can’t even see, but when they visit us they come in rinky dink ships that crash on our planet”. It doesn’t feel all that logical which is why I rank it at a very low probability because that narrative feels false.
Think now some kind of multiverse makes more sense where the technology to jump between parallel worlds is somewhat easy but being away from their infrastructure their ships occasional fail which explains why they lack techs we would expect for a super advanced civ in our universe.
Claims of us having alien ships are much more incredible than simply alien ships messing with us. Where is the Nimitz-tier footage of a flying saucer with a US flag slapped on the side?
If the US has alien spaceships, then what the hell are they doing with the F-35?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What if advanced civilizations become indolent and ultimately self-extinguishing? What if dark forest? Etc, etc.
If you haven't read 95% of a book, you're not in a position to describe the characters. We don't understand 95% of the universe so “we don’t see visual evidence of Aliens colonizing the galaxy” is not sufficient.
On the other hand, we’ve been looking at what we have and none of it points to alien technology in space. And that makes these sort of arguments specious to me. It’s not a discussion of actual evidence, or even theories backed by theoretical physics, it’s simply hand-waving a lack of evidence and treating all those pointing directly to a lack of evidence as “closed-minded”.
I’ll clearly accept that we haven’t seen most of the known universe. That’s not an issue, I’m open to having my mind changed. But you can’t say “well, you’re being closed minded because you’re not accepting aliens when we haven’t explored everything.” I’m skeptical until the evidence at least exists: a microbe of extrasolar origin, an unambiguously artificial signal, an extra solar artificial satellite, something.
To posit aliens with no evidence beyond speculative statements by people with no expertise in astronomy or physics is in a word irrational. And until we find evidence there’s no reason to take any of it seriously.
My point is not that we need to accept aliens based upon our ignorance but that we shouldn't dismiss them based upon our current, insufficient level of knowledge. Above Sliders said his earlier probability was well below 0.001%. He's very confident and I think he shouldn't be.
Furthermore, there are problems with our current model of how things should work. How can it be so improbable for civilizations to develop that we see no evidence within our entire lightcone? Is it that life is improbable, despite the huge number of stars and planets? Or are we looking in the wrong places, in the wrong ways?
What do you think our long-term future in the galaxy looks like? Is it really likely that our technological civilization will just poof out with no real impact? (Even the AI doom scenario involves a superintelligence that will start gobbling up the reachable Universe.) This is the argument underlying the Fermi Paradox: we have only one example of an intelligent civilization, and there seems to be little standing in the way of us spreading through and changing the galaxy in an unmissable way. Interstellar travel is quite hard, but not impossibly so. The time scale for this would be measured in millions of years, which is barely a hiccup in cosmological terms. So why didn't someone else do it first?
On a similar note, I'm very confident I'm not standing next to a nuclear explosion (probability well below 0.001%). Am I overconfident? Ok, yes, I'm being a bit cheeky - the effects of a nuclear explosion are well understood, after all. The chance that there's a "great filter" in our future that would stop us and all similar civilizations from spreading exponentially is a lot larger than 0.001%.
Why is everyone stuck with 'changing the galaxy in an unmissable way' or 'the great filter', when we could just be looking in the wrong places, in the wrong ways?
Why does everyone assume that we have a firm understanding of the limits on an interstellar civilization with massively powerful superintelligences and stellar-scale engineering skills? Maybe if you build a ridiculously huge particle accelerator you can open up opportunities for expansion that make Dyson Spheres look quaint, harnessing or building with 'dark' materials. Maybe if you have quantum gravity and a lot of energy, you can bypass lightspeed limits with some clever warping of space.
I'm not putting limits on anything. The problem with the "ascension" idea isn't that it's impossible - we can't rule it out - but it's that every single member of the ascending civilization, unanimously, would have to stop caring about (or affecting, even by accident) the physical galaxy and the rest of the civilizations in it. Despite a lot of fun sci-fi tropes, ascension isn't some macguffin you build and then everybody disappears. Our modern civilization didn't stop affecting the savannah just because most of us "ascended" out of there. I consider the explanation "everybody's super powerful but also invisible, coincidentally leaving the galaxy looking indistinguishable from an uncivilized one" to be very unlikely. (Not impossible, though.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If I have a book and 5% of the pages I look at are blank, I'll have the strong expectation that the rest of the pages are blank too. And for the same reason - why would the author leave any pages blank? Energy is energy. If you're bothering to colonize any measurable amount of the universe, you'll colonize the rest too. Any species that ever stopped expanding would stop expanding long before it became globally visible.
If we developed Dyson Spheres, we'd stop burning coal or uranium. That energy is more expensive and complex than stellar fusion, doesn't scale so well. Energy isn't just energy, there's energy and there's Energy. The next stage above that is to not mess about with Dyson Spheres and extract energy from some other source - presumably this would be the stuff that makes up the remaining 95% of the universe.
Eh. Dyson spheres are a transitional tech to stellar lifting, where you stop treating suns as god-given infrastructure and start using them as hydrogen mines that happen to be temporarily on fire. But in the really long run, you'll use the coal and uranium too - there's no reason not to. The limit with humans is largely effort, whether personal, investment, or regulatory; I can't see that being an issue for a true post-scarcity post-uploading post-AI society.
We're still very much in the "scale-up" regime, not in the "optimal use" regime.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link