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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.)
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