Fermi's Warning: Problems in Interstellar Exploration and Detection

[I have an article on the Singularity coming up at the European science/fiction magazine Concatenation in a couple months. Please visit their website ahead of time!]

With the discovery of planets around Alpha Centauri, the time for serious discussion of interstellar exploration has arrived. (And it's been going on in earnest for a while now.) Of course, the people who launch the probes will know they can't possibly see the up-close pictures of any extrasolar planets in their lifetimes. But if we're willing to set aside money in endowments to compound interest for the sake of future generations, why not do the same with long-term space travel?

A sensible approach is to send multiple small probes that behave as a network. Even if they can't reproduce, and even if they can't repair each other to some degree, this is superior to putting all your hopes into one object moving at relativistic speeds in unknown domains. It would be bad if, after millennia of waiting, your single big ship hit a comet in Alpha Centauri's Oort cloud. This is the proposal of Allen Tough and is being realized through a Cornell-initiated project now funded by KickStarter. Landers are a tougher problem, particularly on planets with thin atmospheres where we can't use high effectiveness-to-mass technologies like parachutes to slow the descent.

A Sprite chip-sat.
Human missions are much more difficult engineering problems - either of engineering the vehicles, or engineering the humans inside them. The problem of how to get humans to another star is likely to take much longer to solve than how to get unmanned spacecraft to another star. At the same time, keeping our eggs in different baskets is a good survival strategy for the long term, but that's no reason not to send machines out ahead of us.

At the same time, it's possible that if we reach other worlds similar to the one where we evolved, life (intelligent or otherwise) may already be there, and this may impact on our survival also. Consequently any program of interstellar exploration must be part of a program which acknowledges the very frightening implications of the Fermi paradox and also how to detect intelligent life, if it exists. At all costs we should avoid detection, the results of which which may be another answer to the Fermi paradox (i.e. that the Drake Equation should contain a term for predation.)

Consequently, here's a brief summary of some problems in interstellar colonization and interstellar evolution. Surprisingly, I haven't found an argument map for the Fermi paradox, the Singularity and related arguments, which is what I was initially planning to use as a figure.


1. Whatever path we take to the stars, it will likely be one that yields profit in the near term. Interstellar exploration cannot do this, and will have to be borne on the backs of ventures that produce a return for the investors and/or citizens involved, like (possibly) asteroid mining.


2. The Fermi paradox is likely to be solved by one of two things: we are alone at least in terms of intelligent life (i.e., there is a great filter in front of us) or because they exist, but we don't know what we're looking for or at. This latter option complicates things and makes the universe seem more dangerous.


3. To find places that may be useful to us and/or alien life - assuming complex replicators made of matter (will we even recognize complex replicators that aren't?) we may also assume the following are more likely than not, and constrain our search accordingly:

3a. We should look where there is more matter, and more mature stars (longer for life to evolve and expand beyond its home world). This means to look inward toward the galactic center. On Earth, evolutionary innovation comes from the equator and expands north, for a similar reason: more energy into the system, more liquid water, and more evolutionary innovation. A similar principle may describe the distribution and migration of life in a spiral galaxy.

3b. Look for places with the best reaction media to produce replicators. Standing liquid makes the emergence of replicators more likely because you're creating an environment that favors the rapid interaction of molecules. Water is an especially good solvent because of the number of combinations it allows. This isn't an aqueous-carbon chauvenist argument - if there are other environments that allow replicator building-blocks to interact more rapidly and richly, then those environments will be better places to look for life than places with water.


Basis for aqueous chauvenism: it doesn't have to be a planet-wide ocean, but we don't know of any reaction media that encourage diverse chemistry as well as water.

3c. Suspect life in proportion to reaction volume. If we're talking about water, this means more surface area, and more depth. As origin zones, possibly liquid-water-bearing super-Earths are then more likely to originate life than small worlds.

3d. Look for places with a good reaction medium as in 3b, but with low gravity. This directly conflicts with 3c, but low-gravity bodies with water would be good places for life to spread to (i.e. Enceladus) because of the economics of shallow vs. deep gravity wells. A watery moon of a warm gas giant would be even better. In this sense, super-Earths are interstellar East Africas; places like Enceladus are an interstellar Polynesia. (Admittedly intra-Earth colonization is a dangerous analogy in this discussion.)


4. We should look for artifacts at least as much as signals. Artifacts may be easier to recognize as extrasolar better than artificial signals; and, if some form of interstellar colonization is possible, or at least exploration, we should expect to find artifacts in our own solar system already, unless we think we're the first or are somehow amazingly lucky. The presence of artifacts is also a better test for te possibility of interstellar travel than signals. If von Neumann probes are possible (or "space algae", if we can tell the difference) we should look for evidence on small bodies in the solar system, again because of the economics of gravity wells. If we don't find evidence of artifacts once we've explored even a fraction on any low-gravity bodies, and von Neumann probes are possible, then the possibility of life or its artifacts expanding beyond its home solar system is de-valued significantly. (I would put this on Long Bets but at the rate of current exploration, don't think the question will be settled in my lifetime of maybe half a century more.)


5. I've already made many huge assumptions here, and I'm being more conservative than most. It bears keeping in mind that we have N=1 and we don't know what we're looking for or at.

The Fermi Paradox Thickens: More on Colonization Times for Von Neumann Probes

In a previous post I discussed the possibilities of replicators being aided in their diffusion between star systems by close passes; I also pointed to an interesting paper by Forgan et al looking at projected travel times of interstellar probes, based on powered vs. gravity-assist travel. A new paper (on which Forgan is the senior author) looks again at this problem using a Monte Carlo simulation approach, and gets an interesting but as always frustrating answer.

First, the paper would be valuable if all it contained was the excellent review of prior work done on this NP-hard version of the traveling salesman problem. (You think planning your road trip taxes a server?) In particular, they point to a prior paper arguing that von Neumann probe expansions could be slowed or stopped by mutant probes where a predator-prey dynamic evolves in the population and the probes hunt themselves to extinction. I had previously written about self-replicating probes becoming cancerous (a statistically more likely outcome) and turning to expansion above any other mission they previously had; but this only makes the Fermi Paradox more vexing rather than solving it.

Their approach was to simulate the galaxy as having 1 star per cubic parsec (so no local "backwaters"), with self-replicating probes moving at approximately the speed of Voyager I, 1000 m/s. They then compared replicating and non-replicating probes; not surprisingly, self-replicators were much much faster, exploring 100% of a box of 100,000 stars in at most 30 million years. In the replicator condition, the number of probes is no longer the constraint, and contact can occur in (possibly massive) parallel rather than serially. Of note: the authors also include a requirement for communication of which stars have already been explored, although if we assume a robustly replicating probe, this is unnecessary. ("Robust" means that the time and ability to replicate enough probes to successfully reach the neighboring stars are small relative to travel time.)

The authors correctly note that this short time frame makes the Fermi Paradox more vexing. So the alternatives with respect to self-replicating probes are:

1. They're here and we haven't found or noticed them yet.

2. They're not here, because
2a. Replicating probes are not possible or not effective (they can't be made at all, or they mutate)
2b. intelligence capable and willing to build such probes appears more rarely than once every 30 million years in a volume of 100,000 stars (they choose not to, or they don't evolve in the first place, or they wipe themselves out before they create them)

2a seems unlikely because we already know that replicators can develop through natural selection. This leaves us with 1 and 2b. It is certain that we have only the barest knowledge of the rest of our solar system, and gravity wells are expensive to get out of. My prediction is that we'll find evidence of such probes on low gravity bodies (asteroids, comets, small moons) as we continue to explore, but that once we find something strange, it will take time for us to understand what we're looking at.

Hat tip to Ben Weaver.

Modern Technology and von Neumann Probes: And Again, the Fermi Paradox

Good discussion here of how modern technologies (3D printing) could be applied to building our own self-replicating space probes, which in turn inevitably leads to a Fermi paradox discussion. Replicating probes are the way to go because they cover more territory faster. Authors cited in the article place lower and upper bounds on time to colonize the galaxy with self-replicators from 3.75 to 300 million years. Either way, it's difficult to square an apparently empty galaxy with these numbers, or indeed with the feasibility of such an endeavor. In fact, Frank Tipler (who made the upper bound estimate here) went so far as to argue that this has to mean there are no other intelligent aliens.

This version of the Fermi paradox can be solved by any of these:

- Most likely: they're around, and we haven't looked enough, or don't recognize them, or they avoid us because they're more interested in their own replication than in contacting other intelligent species, for some strange reason. We should expect that any self-replicating probes we find will have undergone natural selection to be primarily good at making copies of themselves, and secondarily at performing whatever mission their initial long-ago designers created them for.

- We're over-optimistic, and self-replicating probes are not feasible.

- These time estimates are not conservative enough.

- We really are the only intelligent species, or at least life is extremely rare.

The Singularity and the Fermi Paradox

The idea that there will be a technological singularity relies on the development of self-replicating technology that is able to improve its replication and anticipation of the future (i.e. it is self improving). Those who argue for a singularity would seem to think there is a high likelihood of this happening, assuming humans continue to improve technology.

Therefore, if you believe that technology-using intelligence can evolve elsewhere in the universe, you should also believe that singularities have very probably already occurred elsewhere in the universe, barring an argument that the singularity is somehow predicated on provincial aspects of human technology.

If that is the case, it is very likely that evidence of any non-entropy-driven replicators (i.e. "life") from outside the solar system will be from an alien singularity, rather than the klugey "naturally" evolved aliens themselves.

This argument parallels Bostrom's simulation argument. A general form for arguments of this sort is

A) If the concept of revolutionary technology/event X is coherent,

B) And if humans are not the first technology-using intelligence to evolve,

C) then X has probably already occurred,

D) and also the universe as we already experience it is likely to exhibit characteristics determined by X.


It's worth asking how a very post-singularity star system would look from 50 LY away. Of course by asking about star systems, I'm engaging in matter chauvinism, because I assume matter is required for doing things like computation. Perhaps there are better substrates where we should be looking.

For those who think a human singularity is inevitable, but agree that we have not seen evidence of alien singularities, if the assumptions above are valid, then we should start rephrasing solutions to the Fermi paradox in terms of the singularity:

1) Singularity always equals cancer: when systems of self-organizing matter can move in giant steps rather than tiny incremental steps, their bad rules or inefficiencies matter much more, so they behave unsustainably and destroy themselves (in LessWrong parlance, they become paperclip maximizers.)
This is just a singulatarian instantiation of Fermi's concern that technological civilizations would destroy themselves, making Drake's L factor a major attrition factor.

2) There are signs are all around us but we don't recognize them (or, we just haven't looked hard enough.) We're not so bright. Do we know what a singularity would look like 25 million years after it happened? Don't discount this one. It's my explanation of why we haven't seen found anything yet.

3) We're in a backwater. If we look far enough away, or wait long enough, we'll see them.

4) Singularities conceal themselves. The ones that don't get destroyed.

New Approaches on What the Fermi Paradox Means for the Future of Humanity

I was lucky to attend a video lecture by James Miller, economist at Smith College, facilitated by Joshua Fox. Thanks for having this event! I contacted James to let him know I would be posting this and to let him proofread my recapitulation of his argument so as to avoid mis-paraphrasing him; my thanks to him for taking the time to correct me on several points. Of course any errors are mine.

Much of this is familiar terrain for those of us who spend our time considering X-risk and the Fermi paradox. Miller's thesis is that we are at a critically important point in human history, a window where we think that in the near future we can start colonizing the galaxy (the year 2614 at earliest, by this calculation) but at the same time where we are smart enough to destroy ourselves. Since it is not obvious that the galaxy has already been colonized by other civilizations, there may be a Great Filter stopping this from happening. Miller uses the analogy of a person about to climb a mountain, believing that everyone else who has attempted it has died in the process.

Several challenges were discussed by attendees. (If you attended the lecture and want to claim credit for your question, please comment below, thanks.)

1. It's too early to say there are no civilizations; it may not be so easy to detect them or rule them out. We're still discovering metazoans in Manhattan so it seems a little early to rule out von Neumann probes on low gravity bodies in the solar system. We've barely begun to catalog the fauna of our own ocean floors. We could not detect a twin Earth emitting the same radio energy (the C-index), even if it was orbiting Alpha Centauri. Miller points out that even if there were only a few civilizations in the Milky Way preceding us, "the galaxy is older than it is big", and these earlier civilizations could have colonized it already.
   
   
2. He made the point that the things which prove advantageous in the midst of evolving on a single planet might have no such advantages in terms of galactic colonization. Very true; I would argue that we are much more likely to find alien artifacts, than the aliens themselves, as all of us meat-creatures might be stuck on our planets while our machines colonize the galaxy. To that end, (my point) it's entirely plausible that the Solar System could be littered with space probes and we haven't found any yet, or did, and just didn't know what we were looking at.
   
   
3. I would therefore extend Miller's analogy like this. Only in the process of climbing the mountain, does our climber develop wilderness skills and begin to see things that resemble his own boot tracks, etc. and finally as he approaches the summit realizes that lots of people have climbed it, come down the other side, and their descendants have built large villages which due to his previous ignorance he has not been able to locate. (Or, maybe just some of their livestock, trained birds-of-prey, etc. have made it.)
   
   
4. Active attempts to bring ourselves to the attention of aliens have occurred (METI) and been roundly criticized. Miller notes that the risk of extinction from aliens over the next few centuries is lower than eg bio-terrorism or an intelligence singularity. True; but we still may be making life more difficult for our descendants. Related to this, he proposes an ingenious experiment that for a month we should shout our heads off electromagnetically, and see if there is any strange activity. While I agree it's unlikely we'll get invaded next week, I still think the risk:benefit does not work out and there are just too many unknowns, and we may be screwing our distant descendants. Miller suggested that enforcing a moratorium on METI-like activities is probably impossible.
   
   
5. He argues that technological singularities of the paperclip maximizer variety are unlikely to be a major contributor to the Great Filter, because we would be able to see the boundary of it as it expanded (unless it was doing so at light speed.) My concern with this is that, while an AGI might be much smarter than its creators, it is still not omniscient, and the impact of its actions could in principle still outstrip its ability to predict that impact. This is the story behind the rise of human intelligence and the sixth great extinction that we're living through, but has happened in pulses of endogenous extinctions throughout Earth's history (the rise of superpredators every fifty million years or so, the Oxygen Catastrophe). The lesson of evolution here on Earth is that the smarter things are, the faster their behavioral plasticity "catches up with them" in exactly these sorts of disasters, so to suppose that alien paperclip maximizers are immune to this problem is to argue that a qualitative change in ecological dynamics has occurred.
   
   
6. There were two (possibly unappreciated) related questions asked: one about civilization perhaps being bad for sustaining civilization (witness declining birth rates in the developed world) and another that intelligences might prefer virtual reality - involution - to expanding into space. Miller points out the passive version of the "baseball bat" problem: you can live in heaven, but if a bad guy comes and bashes your server with a club and you as you sleep in your VR pod, that's the end of it. (Related: dynamic complex systems like minds, in principle, tend to drift toward delusion and suffer inherent cyclic crises.) It's a thesis for someone in psychology or a related field to note whether there is causation or just correlation between the increasingly encompassing virtual reality-like entertainments available in the developing world, and declining birth rates.
   
   
7. One questioner asked about the distinction between intelligence and civilization - humans have had a "civilization" only since agriculture. This was a really original line of thought. Therefore, there could be many alien intelligences, but few or no civilizations. One solution for humans avoiding the Great Filter would be to abandon civilization and go back to hunting-gathering - not directly suggested, but this is the only implication of such an argument I could think of. The extreme number of assumptions built in to discussion of alien civilizations should always be pointed out - civilization is something that collections of human nervous systems do, and it is not clear it is a necessary consequence of intelligence. (As a physician I ask: do we assume the aliens will have similar EKG waveforms and liver enzymes as us? No, because that's ridiculous. So we do we assume that the even more complex activity of another organ, that we don't even share with other animals on this planet, is automatically going to be meaningfully similar?)

There's also a psychological point to be made about "big picture" arguments (the singularity, the Fermi paradox, the simulation argument, etc.) They have a tendency to converge on either prophetic religion-like conclusions (e.g. the singularity as the rapture for nerds) or Lovecraft (the estivation hypothesis, which was mentioned in a question and made me think about this.) When we talk about these things, there are many many unknowns. In such discussions, I think there is a tendency for the resulting arguments to resemble the internal contours of the human mind, more than any future events in the actual external world; hence their regression to religion-like conclusions. This does not mean such an argument must be incorrect, but it should make us suspicious when a big-picture argument hews too close to our "ontological test pattern. "

Consider in contrast cosmologists' models of the distant future of the universe, which concern physical objects which we can now observe and characterize, using rigorous mathematical rules. These models often seem boring, meaningless, difficult to understand, and unsatisfying. This is exactly how we should expect most models will seem of things outside our own and our ancestors' experiences, or beyond the scale of time and space to which we are accustomed and which we are built to perceive; the further outside their experience, the moreso. This occurred to me when we were discussing the estivation hypothesis, though overall Miller's arguments do not set off many alarm bells for this quick-and-very-dirty heuristic.

SETI's Detector Array Being Shut Down Due to Lack of Funding

Hey Great Filter/SIA/Fermi Paradox chatterati: if you consider this an important question, here's your chance to put your money where your mouth is. The array at Hat Creek near Mt. Shasta that's the main one used for SETI work is being shut down because they can't pay their bills. They note the irony that this is happening exactly when the number of extrasolar planets we're fidning is sky-rocketing. They need five million U.S. to keep it running. Without an active search, discussions of the Fermi Paradox and aliens will return to being only idle speculation.

A Way Around the Fermi Paradox: Just Look for Life, Not Intelligence

There must be more life than intelligence (assuming that all intelligent things are alive). Even if you think that the solution to the Fermi paradox is that intelligence is an evolutionary dead end, using our own planet as an example, you would have had 3.5 billion years to observe life prior to the emergence of intelligence.

That's why work by MIT's Sara Seager is so exciting (and brilliant). Instead of looking for signals (that we might not notice as signals) or even for artifacts, Seager is looking for chemical signatures of life, period. These techniques will limit us to a smaller set of closer stars, but a) again, life must be more common than intelligence and b) we actually know what we're looking for. In this case, biosignature gases - gases that cannot be in the atmosphere unless there's some non-geologic process actively replacing them. On Earth, that's oxygen. On terrestrial planets, another one is ammonia. That "smaller set" of stars that she's looking at - all M-class, in line with Seager's technique - is still 30,000 systems.

And most excitingly, she kind of puts odds on it: she plugged values into the Drake equation and, based on the actual data that her project will be generating, she thinks there will be two detections of alien life in the next decade. Not everyone gets to build a spreadsheet that translates budget numbers and processor speed into number of projected alien ecosystems discovered.

The Fermi Paradox and von Neumann Probes (Again)

Karl Schroeder points to a paper by Keith Wiley about the Fermi paradox and von Neumann probes. He converges on arguments made here, here and elsewhere:

1) that von Neumann probes are a better way to detect alien intelligences than electromagnetic radiation (either signals or detecting large structures)

2) that if self-replicating probes are possible and there are alien intelligences, there should be loads of them in each solar system already. The best feature of the linked paper is that Wiley takes a stab at estimating how many there should be in this solar system.

3) that the universe as we now see it could already have been profoundly influenced by the activity of intelligent entities, but we don't know because it's the only way we've ever seen it and we have dumb-matter (i.e. natural) explanations for everything. Apparently non-testable but still interesting to think about.

A New Solution to the Fermi Paradox: Masturbation

Yes, basically. UNM evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller worries that our ability to stimulate ourselves with junk food, video games and porn (maybe we should throw cheap credit in there?) will lead to our demise, and whether this hasn't led to similar ends for intelligence elsewhere in the universe. This concern tracks eerily close to a line I extracted from an Vanity Fair article in a post at The Late Enlightenment: "A color-coded map of American personal indebtedness could be laid on top of the Centers for Disease Control's color-coded map that illustrates the fantastic rise in rates of obesity across the United States since 1985 without disturbing the general pattern."

The more general argument that Miller is making is that intelligence is a dead end. Indeed, why do so many seemingly adopt teleological thinking and assume that intelligence is the automatic endpoint of evolution, or at least the best way for replicators to make an impact on the universe? It's kind of strange that seekers of alien life consistently look for intelligence or even "civilization", which may not have any meaning beyond humans. Intelligence is just the most "extreme" form of behavior - and here the term behavior is used in its clearest maning, as biological motors (muscles) moving in response to nervous systems - which in turn are just networks of cells that integrate inputs from pressure, light, and chemical changes external to themselves. Nervous systems respond much more quickly than genes to changes in the environment, because they rely on millisecond-scale changes in ion currents. Of course those networks of ion currents are not perfect modelers of future states, they have weak spots or poor plasticity. They even have analogs of halting states. Therefore, because they change so much more quickly than the genes underlying them, problems in the system can be hugely damaging to those genes, to the point where they all disappear. Organisms profoundly changing their environment in ways that end up killing them is of course the core concern of sustainability advocates and it's happened before, right here on Earth, to the cyanobacteria - even before there was such a thing as behavior.

The Fermi paradox is an ongoing topic here, and other questions include: for Singulatarians, couldn't this be the instrument of the Great Filter, and/or shouldn't we be able to see alien singularities, whether as wave fronts of computronium (or at least von Neumann probes) or at least very strange looking decompiled star systems? Can we in principle even know what to look for? Miller's entry is that the Great Filter need not consist of an intelligence explosion, but rather an intelligence introversion: once a nervous system can game the system - game itself - it's not going to last much longer.

Singularity Solutions

Assuming that recursively self-improving machines of superhuman intelligence develop, and that they matter - i.e. that this intelligence will make them capable of doing things on larger/ faster/ more incomprehensible scales relative to humans - we are very possibly looking at an extinction-level event for humans and all living things. A possible universal tendency for tool-using intelligences to produce technological singularities is one explanation for the Fermi paradox.

The Singularity Institute takes this threat quite seriously, assuming it can (or will) occur in the next century, and and is trying to solve the problem of creating Friendly AI. To do this it would seem they have to be able to systematize morality in order to program said Friendly AIs; an ambitious project, considering people have been trying to do this for centuries. This is what they're attempting.


The Solar System in a century or so, according to one projection. (A Matrioshka brain.)

You should read some of their papers on this (here's a good). My thoughts are inexpert to say the least. Nonetheless, here are possible one-liner solutions or outcomes:

1. There is no solution; morality by its nature is not systematizeable.

2. There is no solution; at least not one that we can understand (cognitive closure of meta-morality).

3. There is no solution; human morality is about coexisting with agents of roughly equal intelligence and power and morality cannot be applied to any agent of such greater power. Technically there may still be a moral optimum here, much like there is a moral optimum to how humans treat captive mice. But this optimum may be (and in fact is likely to be) much worse than the optimum if there were no humans at all. (This could be re-phrased as "learn how to survive as parasites, pets or pests to the AIs")

4. There is no solution with current architecture; the solution is to enhance US. This is what uploading enthusiasts seem to want (make yourself into an AI) although a) you need to be very certain of your theory of consciousness to do this - if I could upload you right now, would you do it? if not, you're not certain - and b) Vinge said to me when I asked him about this (and probably elsewhere) is that as scary as machine superintelligence is, humans might be the last thing we want becoming superintelligent

5. Trap the AIs in virtual worlds where they're distracted, essentially doing whatever virtual masturbatory activities AIs like to do. This has been addressed before, and only has to fail once, and everyone has to cooperate with their own AIs for it to work. (Not to mention, no information in or out to be safe, in which case what's the point?)

6. Build into the AIs a desperate need not to change the world in any way that could only be explained by their presence. Of course this exacerbates the epistemological problem of the singularity - if we can't in principle understand what's happening, can we even say that it has not already happened? And how do we enforce this on other people working on AIs?

7. Build a successful moral and decision theory into the AIs. (This appears to be the Singularity Institute's Plan.) The problem here is that as the date approaches, it's very unlikely that the majority of humans will understand and accept such a theory, even if it really is optimal for each human. Consequently there is massive elitism inherent in this endeavor; once we're within reach of recursively self-improving AI, the time for conversation will be over, and they'll have to go with the best theory they have. (Again, how to enforce this, and how to avoid mutations that free the AIs from the constraints of the optimal moral theory?)

8. Stop all AI research and training of AI researchers, and harshly penalize attempts therein.

9. It only takes one mutation or AI terrorist to break #s 4, 5, 6 or 7 above - so develop an anti-recursive-AI predator that wipes out new AIs, if someone doesn't abide by an agreement not to produce them, and against "cancerous" versions of itself. This is yet another one for the Fermi paradox: many have asked where are the expanding computronium clouds speeding toward us from alien singularities, but
we might ask where the alien anti-AI predators are? Are we already seeing broken bits of them in the chemistry on comets and asteroids?


Note the recurrence of the "it only has to happen once, and everyone has to cooperate" theme. Bostrom recently said that with nuclear weapons developing as the first existential threat, we were actually lucky, because nuclear weapons are hard to make. If some technology comes along that's not only easy to make but can make more of itself, the game is over. Imagine nukes that you can make from table-salt, ammonia, and a toaster oven. And then the nukes can breed. That's AI, if the singularity happens.

In systematizing moral theories, the Singularity Institute paper here classifies them, and posits that AIs pursuing the logical conclusion of a purely hedonic theory ("the most pleasure") would be to tile the universe with brains cycling through their most pleasurable possible experience for as long as possible ("the eternal f*** dimension", as one correspondent referred to it). One interesting conclusion is that individuals who have less than optimal ability to experience pleasure would detract from the universe's ability to produce pleasure (one human brain loaded with inefficient evolutionary legacy systems is much worse than a near 100% efficient virtual nucleus accumbens having a prolonged orgasm for eternity.) Fundamentally flawed consciousnesses like this might therefore be eliminated by the AIs, like you might euthanize a pet that's dying from cancer, when keeping it will only make it and its owner continue to suffer.

It's also worth pointing out that other moral theories are really just more complicated forms of hedonism, but the bigger problem is that that pleasure is functionally pointless in a world where it's not in limiting supply.

The Fermi Non-Paradox: We’ve Barely Started Looking

One solution to the Fermi paradox is that there is no paradox. We don't know what to look for, and we've barely started.

To reinforce this point: a metagenomics project has just discovered 662 new species of bacteria. From human navels.

It's a little arrogant to think that we've done all the looking we need to in order to say there are no aliens. Imagine pre-contact Native Americans spending an afternoon staring out over the Atlantic and at sunset saying, "Alright guys, enough of that. There's nothing out there."

Where Are the Post-Singularity Replicators: A New One for Fermi and Bostrom

One of the underlying assumptions of singularity arguments is that not only will technology improve sufficiently to hit an inflection point beyond which tools improve themselves to the point of something usefully called intelligence and reproduction, but that this is basically inevitable, as long as we don't destroy ourselves before then. (Whether the singularity would destroy us is another question.) A final assumption is that sufficiently advanced post-singularity machines will be able to preserve or add to themselves, or replicate, by recruiting "dumb" matter far better than current Earth biology can, as we do when we eat and breathe.

If we make the additional assumption that any intelligence in the universe which uses tools and has behavior will incrementally improve those tools - then the same should happen for any other species.

Taking these assumptions as valid, we should assume that the universe we observe should already be heavily influenced by singularity events. But it is NOT obviously behaving in any way that dumb matter doesn't behave. I observed in a previous post that singularity arguments, taken to their conclusion, track Bostrom and Fermi: if these are such powerful principles in the evolution of the universe, shouldn't we already be experiencing the consequences?

Even more generally speaking (outside of singularity arguments) shouldn't we assume that, given enough time, most matter and energy will eventually be locked up into replicators, if living things and/or intelligence continues to expand? It's worth emphasizing that all of the arguments are some version of the self-indication argument, although the where-are-all-the-singularity argument is a hypothetical SIA, which I am using to argue against the probability of a singularity.

The most likely answer, based on what we know so far, is that there have been no singularities, which in turn means that it is less likely than we might otherwise have thought that we will have a singularity. While some version of panspermia seems more and more plausible, the seeding of young worlds with nucleobases and amino acids isn't exactly what people have in mind in these discussions. Indeed the absence of expanding "life clouds" argues not just against singularities as such but against the indefinite expansion and survival of life. But there are a number of possible counterarguments:

- Entropy wins; matter and energy also get locked up into black holes faster than life and/or intelligence can employ that matter for their own preservation.

- By the nature of physics, only a very small fraction of matter and energy can be pressed into service as a substrate for life and intelligence.

- Replicators are always unstable processes. This solves Fermi's paradox by making Drake's omega attrition factor much more influential to the outcome.

- Most of what we observe is indeed the result of such processes (galaxies, stars, our own solar system?) and we either don't have the pattern recognition skills to see it or are only observing a vanishingly small slice of possible data. (This one makes for the best science fiction ideas, and also is more analogous to Bostrom than Fermi.)

- Humans are the only species that uses tools and improves them.

- We're lucky and we're the first, or one of the first, and the expanding sphere of others' computronium hasn't hit us yet.

If I had to bet, I would bet against the last two.

A Neglected Solution to the Fermi Paradox

The most common answers to Fermi's famous question "Where is everybody?" are some version of either "we're unique", or "something makes intelligent species short-lived on geological time-scales". This second category corresponds to Drake's Omega Factor and could be the result of self-destruction or predation by nearby interstellar replicators.

A far more plausible explanation for our failure to find anything so far is summed up as "They're out there, but we haven't been looking for long, and we don't know what to look for anyway." The good people of SETI have said that so far, all we can conclude that the sky is not littered with constantly-blaring high-power microwave transmitters. Such cautious phrasings are wise. And from such a specific statement as this, are we really able to generalize that we're the only nearby intelligence?

Assuming that intelligence and tool use progress at roughly similar rates in other species, consider the gap in cognition and tools in our own species just over the past 100,000 years. And what is the chance that a planet-bound intelligence would be synchronized even within an order of magnitude of that timeframe? Would H. erectus understand our attempts to communicate? Would we even recognize our own million-year descendants, much less understand them? Now apply that to space-tuna, and you see the magnitude of the problem.

To say we haven't found anything so far, and therefore there are no non-human intelligences, seems foolish. We are barely a half-century into trying to answer this question, and it's not clear that we even know what to look for.

I reiterate that the best place to look for evidence of extraterrestrial replicators are the asteroids and the comets of our own solar system (my reasoning is here.) We should be looking for chemical traces of von Neumann biochemistry, not radio signals grandly announcing their presence. While I don't expect a thorough investigation of these bodies to be completed in my lifetime, I would be thrilled if it were. A lack of findings would cause me to dramatically lower my estimation for the chances of extra-terrestrial replicators.

Meteors Probably Supplied Activated Phosphorus to Early Earth

ATP.

Paper here. This has interesting implications for the von Neumann probe panspermia hypothesis - that is, that there are chemical von Neumann probes (or merely dumb replicators) hitching interstellar rides on small bodies with hyperbolic orbits, and we're a side effect. Consider also that comets delivered most of our water.

Since such a mechanism to build depots for future biochemistry doesn't seem a terribly unlikely occurrence in solar system formation in general, this raises the likelihood of life, but also makes the Fermi paradox (and Great Filter arguments) more exigent.

Welcome, Nerd Metal Listeners

If you want smart metal criticism and reccomendations, along with a healthy dose of discussion about the Singularity, von Neumann probes, thr Fermi paradox and the simulation argiment, you're in the right place. Don't believe me goddammit? Scroll down. By the time you realize what you're in for it will be TOO LATE!

General AI: Computation versus Survival, Superintelligent is Not Omniscient

It is usually assumed that a superintelligent AI would maniacally focus on improving computation. Just to highlight the centrality of computation, a recent paper in the British Interplanetary Society Journal argued that the reason we don't see aliens is they're sleeping, waiting for a time when the universe is cool enough that their computations are more efficient. The alien singularities are waiting until they don't need to be cooled.

The most common concern associated with this line of thinking is that the technological singularity would be bad because the AIs would use all available resources - starting with all matter on Earth, including us - as computational resources. While I think a technological singularity would be catastrophic, I think the reason is eve more mundane.

Of course, this assumes that the AIs in all their power are maximizing computation. I don't think this is questioned nearly enough, and a good bit of the inertia around it stems from the cultural assumptions of the programmers and engineers making the argument. The singularity is thought of as a logical outcome of Moore's law, which concerns exponential growth in computation. It's not clear that this is what an AI would necessarily be maximizing. For our part, humans and other animals maximize a host of confused and often contradictory goals. Of course we remain in this mess because we are not recursively self-modifying. Assuming that AIs with such an ability aren't automatically condemned to wirehead, it's not unreasonable to ask whether there are things to maximize that increasing computations just wouldn't fix.

Replicators whose descendants are present into the future are the result of selection for one thing - making copies - and to the extent that extra computation can improve that, then the AIs present in the future will be selecting for computation that helps them reproduce and sustain themselves. But even a superintelligent AI is not an omniscient AI, and cannot see infinitely into the future and understand ahead of time the impact of all its actions in maximizing its survival OR computation. My strong suspicion is that a hard takeoff will likely be an apocalyptic gray goo explosion, much more thorough and faster than the mass extinctions so far in the much more comparatively mildly ecocidal anthropocene, and that furthermore this is a strong candidate for the Great Filter and the Fermi paradox. That is to say, we're more likely to find the simple but fecund survivors of such an event as something that looks like post-singularity AI-algae (or free-roaming AI "cancer") than alien AIs that are interested in philosophy.

Intelligence Itself as the Great Filter

[I have an article on the Singularity coming up at the European science/fiction magazine Concatenation in a couple months. Please visit their website ahead of time!]

I referred to the Great Filter in an earlier post.  This is the idea that the great silence the Fermi paradox seeks to explain is not illusory:  we really are alone.  If that is the case, then since we know of one example of life and intelligence which did evolve, there must some event or set of events that dramatically decreases the odds of life evolving, becoming intelligent, and spreading from its home or at least signalling its presence.  By self-indication arguments, we can assume that many other species have achieved a level of intelligence similar to our own, but that something must have happened afterward to keep them from persisting or expanding.  This means it is also likely that the filter is still in front of us, i.e. that we will go extinct or at least be permanently confined to our solar system.  I'm increasingly unable to discount the idea that intelligence itself is probably, usually, an evolutionary dead end. 

The less interesting version of this idea is that given the way evolution works, intelligence is invariably layered on top of older systems like emotions and appetites, which were previously constrained by the limits of their behavior but once amplified by intelligence quickly destroy the surrounding ecosystem.  (Essentially, the Special Agent Smith argument, but stripped of misanthropic moralizing.)

The more interesting version is that once a self-aware entity understands that pleasure and survival are separable - i.e., that its survival signal is not the same as its actual survival - and has the means to manipulate the former intentionally (ie full simulation and/or goal manipulation, which are the ultimate ends of heroin, pornography, and ideology) then the end is close.  This is a much more pessimistic version of involution.  Singularities could be thought of as either of these - a form of ecologic degradation that doesn't result in interstellar colonization, or as an opportunity to dissolve into fantasy worlds.

Finally, it could just be that it's incredibly unlikely that any life which evolves from matter, at the bottom of a gravity well, with a life-cycle inextricable from such an environment (needing an atmosphere, solvent, a complex web of other replicators), simply cannot expect to expand across a universe where even inside the comparatively cluttered galaxies the possible new homes are separated by light years.  To a first approximation, the universe is made of vacuum with some dark matter.  It may be then that every star is surrounded by an insurmountable Wallace Line.

The Singularity Will Be An Extinction Event, and an Endogenous One

There have been exogenous extinctions, ie not from an ecosystem's "internal contradictions." Examples are massive magma flows like the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary, or the asteroid strike like the K/T Boundary. These were at least partly caused by out-of-context events that life on Earth did not influence. Then there are endogenous extinctions, which were caused entirely by the actions of the system itself, with no external disturbance. The best example is the Great Oxygenation Event, where the cyanobacteria inadvertently poisoned themselves, and paved the way for a whole new kind of metabolism. About every 26 million years, a superpredator develops and kills everything – humans are filling this role currently – and even if there's not an extinction, there's a local minimum in biodiversity and ecological robustness.

Since we're the aerobic beneficiaries of the Great Oxygenation, we like to narrativize this in the form of a teleologic happy ending. That is: the story becomes, yes the cyanobacteria poisoned themselves, but it was to make way for the glory of oxygen-breathing life. That oxygen they fatally polluted themselves with turned out to be an improvement, a new fitness landscape. Any endogenous extinction clears the way for evolutionary progress!

This is false. Of course the Great Oxygenation Event turned out to be survivable, because we're here looking back on it. But choose any other model example of a closed ecosystem where the endogenous activity of the local organisms is rapidly changing their environment, and you are unlikely to find that the majority of them are success stories. Things poison themselves, and end up with no descendants that can survive. (There is no argument to exclude humans from this phenomenon. Both deforesting Easter Island and the ongoing Great Carbonization Event are good examples.)


Two implications follow:

1. The reason for the Great Silence (ie the Fermi paradox) could be that there are many watery worlds out there which evolve local cyanobacteria, but they have their own endogenous shocks, and these do not result in a survivable planet, or at least in a richer potential fitness landscape. As in Conway's Game of Life, if they're lucky they either settle into a simple oscillating system (bloom, mass extinction, bloom, same kind of mass extinction, ad infinitum) or the ecosystem collapses completely and ends.

Speculation regarding this: we're fairly confident the first metabolism on Earth was sea vent iron sulfur organisms, using sulfur in what is now oxygen's chemical role. The Great Oxygenation may have only happened when it did, a full 1.5 billion years after the first life and at least 800 million years after photosynthesis appeared, because an asteroid delivered molybdenum, allowing nitrogen fixation and more efficient anaerobic metabolism. Whatever the reason, had this happened prior to photosynthesis, we may have ended up with an Earth poisoned with sulfur or at least with a massive amount of oxidized sulfur.

In an interesting parallel observation: we're also confident that Venus was once a wetter, cooler world that had a runaway greenhouse effect. One of the mysteries of Venus is the origin of all the sulfur in its thick atmosphere; to a first approximation all sulfur on Earth's surface is assumed to be from volcanoes, but why so much more on Venus? Another mystery is the identity of the small UV absorbers (about the size of bacteria) that form the dark bands in its atmosphere; one idea is that they're cells descended from ancestors that evolved at the surface and now can only survive in the more benign lower temperatures and pressures of the high clouds. If indeed these are the survivors of a Great Sulfuration Event, while the event did not result in total extinction, it limited the Venusian ecosystem to oscillate on a barren fitness landscape, just from the bad luck of having richer crust contents or earlier impacts with potential-enzyme-cofactor-bearing asteroids that allowed more efficient iron-sulfur metabolism.

(Recent evidence however suggests a massive volcanic event 700 MA ago that resurfaced the planet after massive flows; this which may be enough to explain all the sulfur. A gradual boil off of water remains quite likely, for two reasons – the D/H ratio on Venus is about 150 times higher than Earth, where comets have at most a 3 times higher ratio than Earth, suggesting loss to space of hydrogen from water and preferential retention of the heavier nucleus; and that such a massive volcanic event could have been caused by the loss of water, and the cessation of plate tectonics which allow a cataclysmic buildup of heat. It's interesting that the Siberian trap flows and CAMP happened during a period on Earth when the continents were crammed together and perhaps less efficient at letting out volcanic heat, though these events were still nowhere near what happened on Venus.)

2. If a technological Singularity occurs, it would be an endogenous extinction. In this case we are the cyanobacteria, and our extrasomatic adaptations are the contradiction internal to the system, and the AIs are our oxygen-breathing descendants. Like them, we produced the conditions that destroyed us and paved the way for the next phase of life. It's true that cyanobacteria and anaerobic organisms persist but do not dominate the world as they did in the Archaean. Even if cellular life survives the Singularity, being relegated to the role of cyanobacteria is unappealing for most.

But then there is another possibility, in which the AIs drive themselves extinct too. Think of this as the super-pessimistic case. Singularity optimists think we can benefit from or at least co-exist with superintelligence (becoming the equivalent of cyanobacteria is actually optimistic in this scheme.) Singularity pessimists think the event will kill all biology. Here, I suggest the super-pessimist position, which is that the Singularity may kill us, then also itself, in the final, most spectacular ecocide of Earth's history. Why? One theory is that any self-improving superintelligences will necessarily disassemble matter, including whole planets, into atoms that can be used for computation. But there is no principle stating that intelligence must always exceed power; that is, that impact of behavior must grow more slowly than ability to predict impact of behavior. Certainly it didn't happen with cyanobacteria, and given the sluggishness of our response to global warming it might not be happening with humans. Even if the AIs are in fact superintelligences, they are still not omniscient. As they're disassembling everything, they may get to the end of a predictive computation and realize that part of the code has gone cancerous and is replicating out of control (and consuming matter in the process) and can't be called back, or they're going to run out of power before they get to the next planet or star system, or overheat, or whatever problem an AI might run into.

Therefore, if the Singularity does happen, it would be just one type of endogenous extinction. If in a hundred million years, aliens or their self-replicating probes visit the solar system (if such things ever occur in the history of the universe) they might find its dusty, partly-disassembled remains, and file the data under "ecosystems that ended with behavioral/artifactual singularities" and then move on. Interestingly, we have already found old planetary systems that are far dustier than we would expect, with no explanation for the inner dust ring and a some constant replenishment process. Even this assumes that the self-replicating alien probes can get there before becoming cancerous dead-ends themselves.

The Fermi Paradox From An Economist's Standpoint

As a dismal scientist, Karl Smith is probably onto something when he asks Where Is Everybody.

Mieville's Embassytown

...is good. Read it. Spoiler alert.
(Not everyone loved it; for a comical review by someone who didn't get it and probably also reviews Chinese restaurants in terms of how Mexican they are, go here.)

Mieville likes designing monsters and also frequently defends science fiction as a literature of ideas. Both are on display here. Early on, before any real action, to keep things interesting, he inserts a monster that stowed away on a transport in hyperspace, something that must adapt to our universe and assemble itself out of matter and actions and relationships in this dimension. That was very cool. (I also think his cactus-men and especially mosquito women demi-humans in The Scar were pretty awesome too; not everyone gets as big a kick out of them as I do.) He also reimagines hyperspace as something called "the Immer", short for immersion; sort of the highest permanent reality, with ours only a pale reflection (characters mention our universe is the third one). One thing different about this take is that the Immer is really the basic, permanent universe and we're a temporary reflection built on top of it (usually hyperspace is conceived of as being "between" or "beyond" the real world).
It's hard not to think of Plato's world of forms - another connection to a Stephenson work, Anathem, where the world of forms is explcitly discussed as a literal real place - but I don't think that's what he was implying. He even solves the Fermi paradox by noting that the first human probes into the Immer picked up lots of communication and beacons: it's just that no one uses normal space. The most disappointing aspect of his flavor of hyperspace was that people get nauseous in the Immer. This is a heavily used convention in science fiction, but here I think Mieville falls for something that he avoids elsewhere: the idea that human (or any) biology would have a reaction and compensation for something it never encountered. For example, ionizing radiation is scary precisely becaues it doesn't hurt, or smell bad, or even irritate you, while it's killing you. No organism ever needed an alarm, because there wasn't any in our environment. Similarly no Earth organism has ever been in hyperspace/the Immer/whatever you want to call it, and a more interesting treatment might have been to have it damage us in odd ways that we aren't aware of until it's too late. Overall I'm pleased that he took an old convention and made it much more interesting; he seems to realize that you might as well because ultimately, whatever you call "hyperspace", it boils down to being a heaven or underworld that is described with sciencey-sounding language and that lets you get where you want to go in a reasonable amount of time.

I read this book mainly for the linguistic thought experiments, which were interesting, and reminiscent of Snowcrash and even moreso of Julian Jaynes's Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a version of which the humans in the story directly induce. He's clearly thought through his ideas. I like it when an author explains a weak point that I hadn't identified; it shows s/he's doing his/her job. The explanations weren't always convincing but then again, it's fiction, not a linguistics textbook.

He also does a good job straddling the boundary of keeping the aliens alien, but allowing an interaction with humans that makes for good plot. I like how his here-and-there descriptive hints of the Hosts sort of gives you a picture, but not really: once he describes them as bird-insect-horse-coral creatures. He definitely does his best to avoid the intelligent gerbil effect. And he drops hints if you're paying attention that show there's a lot more to know about this universe's history: without saying so explicitly, several times we hear people mention Earth not as a myth, but as a place you can't get to anymore.

For my money right now Mieville's prose is the best in speculative fiction. My only complaint about him on this front was the over-dramatic single-line paragraphs in his Bas-Lag series, but those are gone. I hate having to still say this about science fiction, but his tone is very adult and nearly lit-fic. I wish everyone in the genre took their prose this seriously.

A sure sign that I really like an author is when I find myself making guesses about the person while I'm reading their fiction, or looking for little clues. For example, I know Mieville is a socialist so I can't help but look for allegorical clues or little lessons in his work, but I don't find any. He does have a few interesting comments about colonialism and racism in general, including one observation about the function of stories about natives going berserk and killing people when some minor social norm is violated (are those stories really about our insensitivity, or about natives being oversensitive and superstitious and stupid?) Not that his putting his political ideas in stories would be bad, even if you don't share them; I would mainly be wanting to see them done well, like Vinge does in Deepness in the Sky. What you do see in his work, quite clearly, are the messy unprincipled realities of politics. Normally I can't stand to waste my time reading about the politics of people and places that don't exist - I can barely stand to read about politics in the real world - but somehow Mieville pulls it off. I tried to figure out what he does differently and so far I haven't been able to.

Another pattern: in both The Scar and Embassytown, we see a female protagonist romantically involved with a morally very imperfect male who is maybe a little bit too sure of his own abilities and vision and value. This doesn't stick out quite as much as Paul Auster's odd insistence on killing his protagonists' families, but an odd amount of space is given to explicating the protagonists' lover's personality. Is this Mieville examining parts of himself he doesn't care for? A clever marketing trick to appeal to female readers? Pure speculation and maybe even coincidence, although again, Mieville does this well.

Probably my biggest disappointment with Embassytown was in the portions where the humans leave the city and go out into the Ariekene fields. We get some interesting ideas about Ariekene ecology and the mismatches that arise when alien evolutions collide (good) but very little of the sense experience of being out in alien fields. What color are things? What does it smell like? What does the land look like, and the soil and the rocks and the hills? (It's a good sign though that I care enough to be disappointed we don't get more of this.) I suspect the reason for his disinterest is that Mieville seems to be very much a metro guy, very much in love with London and the complexities of cities in general (that's quite clear in The Scar) and while he renders human landscapes expertly, he neglects natural ones. You see similar blind-spots in many American writers from New York, and (more often and more oddly) Los Angeles.