Kurzgesagt (In a Nutshell)

Today's subject is what if the KT Impact asteroid was just the peak of BS that hit the non avian dinosaurs. It's about the Deccan Traps possibly being the main cause of dino extinction. Kinda feels like forcing climate catastrophe on the dinos lol.

Edited by alekos23 on Mar 26th 2024 at 8:23:48 PM

Given the trend of discourse these days, I'm waiting for someone to figure how to blame the volcanic eruption on DEI.

Isn't the theory that the dinosaurs were already going extinct before the asteroid kinda fringe and contested?

That was the case from what I remember.

It's not all that fringe, and it's been around as a serious theory for a long time.

x3

Its generally agreed the eruption of the Deccan Traps definitely stressed the environment and the impactor was a coup de grace but the relative proportion of responsibility is debated.

I personally suspect that there is some people pushing the Deccan eruptions as being more significant than they actually were because of an institutional prejudice against non-terrestrial options for potential explanations. Some geologists are a bit too attached to the "geo" part

Personally I prefer these sorts of solutions to the Fermi paradox that consider that it's possible that space is just REALLY hard regardless of technological advancement.

That is overwhelmingly the most likely solution to the Fermi Paradox: that it's just too difficult for advanced life to travel to other solar systems. It's also a depressing one, since it means we're probably stuck here. While it may be prohibitive to move out, so to speak, we can still send probes to other stars, and even have concepts for doing so.

Surely we can't be the first, meaning that we should expect to see other civilizations hurling relativistic spacecraft into the void to look for signs of life, or at least find traces of their passage if such a thing is possible at all. If we meet any neighbors, we could engage them in really long-distance conversations.

The other likely scenario is that spacefaring civilizations are incredibly rare. This one is better for us since, having made it through a really big Great Filter, we've got better odds of getting through the next ones. It would make it far less likely to meet aliens, though, which is disappointing.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 16th 2024 at 10:32:35 AM

I suspect the answer is somewhere in the middle. There's aliens out there colonizing their solar systems, but the age of the galaxy, combined with how hard it is to make any consistent communication visible passed a few hundred lightyears, means we're all probably groping around in the dark. I find the idea of dark forests to be as presumptuous as easy aliens, if only because it assumes they'd have the resources necessary to be noticed outside of their home systems at all.

I am also skeptical of Dark Forest, mainly because all it takes is one civilization to break the silence for the whole thing to fail. Still, we should be careful of motivated thinking. We have no way to disprove it and so we have to take it seriously as a possible answer.

That said, our current instruments should be able to detect a Type 2 civilization within a few hundred light-years via the spectral patterns of their parent stars caused by Dyson Swarms or the equivalent, and we are actively looking for such signatures. So far, nothing. A potential signal from the Trappist system recently was confirmed to be dust.

If we detect Type 2 signatures but see no signs of interstellar travel or communication, that lends credence to the "it's really hard to go interstellar" hypothesis, while lowering the likelihood of Dark Forest since civilizations hiding from others would not occlude their own stars in detectable ways.

Since we see no signs of stellar engineering, that substantially reduces the probability of Alien Zoo as the answer to the paradox, bringing us back to the "it's just too hard" answers, while not ruling out Dark Forest.

The thing about Dark Forest is that it's a mind virus, much like Roko's Basilisk. That's because if we can think of it, other civilizations can also, and the more people get it into their heads, the more likely it is to come true.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 16th 2024 at 11:18:11 AM

Wasn't the Dark Forest something that came from a book?

As for the lack of things like Dyson Swarms or megastructures, I honestly wouldn't use that as proof against the existence of interstellar civilization. Mainly because we really have no idea what an interstellar civilization would actually look like, those are simply guesses on what they might look like. We may very well have to look for signs that we don't even know exist.

While true, we have to start somewhere, and that means looking for recognizable signatures. "What if it's too alien to detect," is, no offense, a gotcha question that has no real scientific value.

We assume that an interstellar civilization will need access to a large amount of energy. Stars are the most abundant sources of energy in any solar system. Ergo, stellar engineering to extract energy from said stars is the obvious step.

If we can think of it, surely other people can. It's not morality or culture; it's physics.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 16th 2024 at 11:49:08 AM

I confess, I'm eager for any rebuttal to the Dark Forest hypothesis.

That's largely Isaac Arthur's thinking as well. While we don't know what aliens or their technology would be like, we do know how physics works, and it's not hard to detect complex radioactive elements as technosignitures, should they be out there and within range. It's also why oxygen atmospheres, or at least oxygen-consuming species is still viable, just because it's so darned useful for chemical reactions. heck, fire's something we take for granted, but it's only possible on Earth in all of the solar system.

Just because you could build an alien empire with solar light sails, that doesn't mean radio waves won't still be useful.

Like I said, I have strong doubts about it but no way to prove myself right (or wrong). I do not believe that all alien civilizations would share the same psychological traits as ours, nor that they would just collectively choose to stop expanding right before they become detectable at astronomical distances. Some, maybe, but every single one? It defies belief.

All you'd need is one alien Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos to decide to build a Dyson Swarm or send probes to other stars, and the game would be up.

Dark Forest only works if every single civilization adopts it, and that seems really unlikely.

Based on current technological progress in space exploration, we're probably going to use lasers for high throughput communications. Radio won't be the dominant method for much longer, but will instead be more of a backup.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 16th 2024 at 11:52:26 AM

I'm actually friends with Isaac Arthur.

For my part, my opinion on the Fermi Paradox is basically that we don't really have enough evidence to go on. I would assume that there's alien civilizations out there that colonize space to some degree that would talk to us if they detected us.

I do, however, feel confident that Dark Forest Theory is pretty unlikely, it'd require basically every civilization to adopt intense paranoia.

Or there could be Reapers that eat any civilization that becomes detectable from interstellar distances. It's the sort of thing one can only disprove by elimination. An RKKV could be on its way to Earth right now and we wouldn't know until we died.

Again, I find this hypothesis unlikely, but it's impossible to rule out until/unless we find some un-Reapered civilizations.

To recap, the primary answers to the Fermi Paradox are, roughly, as follows:

• It's just too hard to travel to and colonize other star systems. Nobody ever manages it. (Great Filter)
• Technological/spacefaring civilizations are incredibly rare. (Great Filter)
• Humans just happen to be one of the first, if not the first advanced civilization in this neck of the galaxy. (violates the Copernican Principle)
• No civilizations ever build Dyson Swarms or other megastructures that are detectable from astronomical distances, nor attempt to communicate or probe other solar systems. (Dark Forest)
• The Reapers wipe out civilizations that poke their heads up.
• Advanced civilizations send out swarms of self-replicating probes that annihilate life on any planet they encounter. (Berserker hypothesis)
• There is a galactic civilization but it actively prevents "primitive" planets from learning about it until they're ready. (Alien Zoo)
• There's plenty of life out there but it's so weird that we can't detect it.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 17th 2024 at 2:21:12 PM

This is pretty much the solution I've always thought of as highly plausbile. It seems like people just assume technology will advance without limit because we're in an era of rapid advancement, but there *is* a ceiling, and we don't really know where it is yet. It'd be a mistake to assume technology can make interstellar colonization feasible, let alone things like Dyson spheres or near light speed travel.

And then, it's not like these explanations are mutually exclusive, either! Factor in the possibility of great filters, both before and after our level? The vastness of space and the difficulty of detecting aliens even extremely close to us? And the equal vastness of time that would exist between most civilizations? Yeah, it doesn't surprise me at all we haven't seen evidence of aliens, in the very short time we've been looking with limited instruments. Really, we're just getting way ahead of ourselves to declare it a "paradox".

Edited by FGHIK on Apr 17th 2024 at 10:12:10 AM

The paradox can be expressed very simply: "We're here, and we shouldn't be alone, so where is everybody else?"

Given that we don't know of any physical limitations to interstellar travel and communication aside from their difficulty, it's a reasonable question to ask.

For me it boils down to "yes we want to go to other worlds, but it's outrageously cheeper to stay on our pretty good world we've got at our feet.

Unless someone cooks up a con that hinges in sending people to populate other worlds, an opportunistic population will struggle to justify it when staying put is the better opportunity.

That is one possible solution, yes. But it also means that no civilization will ever survive the death of its sun. I'd prefer not to live in a universe where that's true.

Admittedly it may seem weird to say that "we've only got five billion years left". That's incomprehensible on human scales. But the universe has been around for 13.8 billion years (at least), and will exist for many millions of times longer. So...

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 17th 2024 at 11:58:28 AM

Actually, we only have 800 million years left unless we solve some major problems first.

Star induced death is so slow and gradual that a mortal race might not even notice that they're being backed into a corner as less and less of the planet/star system becomes inhabitable. Backed into a corner where the logistics of interstellar emigration becomes either logistically unviable, or only worthwhile to relocate to the nearest suitable star system.

I could see a scenario where populations usually only find the motivation to hop star systems when their current one becomes a true hindrance.

Edit: What happens in 800 million years?

Edited by Whowho on Apr 17th 2024 at 9:09:43 AM

The sun gets so hot that photosynthesis shuts down and the oceans evaporate, which is game over for pretty much all life but the most extremophile bacteria. We will be broiled to death long before the sun swallows us.

The Sun will keep heating up as it burns through more of its fuel. This is standard for main-sequence stars, and in somewhere between 500 million years and a billion, the Earth's surface will become too hot to support liquid water, plus the atmosphere will lose most of its free carbon dioxide so plants die out.

There are potential ways to address this problem. We could build a giant mirror at the L1 Lagrange point, we could shift Earth's orbit to be farther away, we could dump extra mass on the Sun to prolong its lifespan. These are all things that a sufficiently advanced civilization might attempt.

But in five billion years or so, the Sun will run out of hydrogen in its core and go into its red giant phase, burning helium in successive waves of fusion that will end with it shedding its outer layers and becoming a white dwarf. When that happens, we're done. No solar engineering can save us.

Edit:

It's not a surprise. We know it's going to happen. Whether some far-future human, mantis, rat, or cockroach civilization will decide to try to do something about it is impossible to predict.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 17th 2024 at 1:27:53 PM