So with a year and half and a couple dozen
videos between now and when I did the original Dyson Dilemma video I thought it was about
time to revisit the Fermi Paradox and I thought it was a good idea to start by releasing more
updated and improved versions of the early material. That includes this subject and its
main companion video where we try to take a brief but detailed look at all the proposed
solutions to the Fermi Paradox. Since the original Dyson Dilemma video this
is replacing tended to be the gateway video for the channel, meaning odds are this is
the first time you are hearing me, let me say now what I forgot to say then. I have
a speech impediment, I cannot pronounce the the years to explain this absence of aliens,
this Great Silence among the stars, and we single out some of the better candidates for
their own in-depth videos, but today we’ll be looking at the notion that Alien Technological
Civilizations come into existence so infrequently that none have ever existed in our own galaxy
or likely in any of the million or so nearest galaxies.
I’ll be arguing to you that the strongest piece of evidence against alien civilizations
existing anywhere near us is the simple fact that we can see stars in our own night sky.
That the visibility of those stars, the very reason we took such an interest in the heavens
and learned how truly immense the Universe was, represents the strongest proof there’s
nobody else nearby us to share it. But the problem with most Fermi Paradox solutions
is that tend to revolve around the classic science fiction concept of flying out in faster
than light ships to settle world after world. As we’ve explored in other videos, realistically
even if you can find a way around the speed of light, this image is probably flawed and
by and large we won’t go out and terraform planets, will outright build them instead,
and that alters the equation of the Fermi Paradox a lot, because we have to contemplate
what civilizations with serious robotic automation and near unlimited energy would do.
To explain that we need to talk about the hypothetical megastructure called a Dyson
Sphere. In the megastructures playlist we’ve looked at giant artificial structure thousands
of miles long and even outright manufacturing artificial planets, but Dyson Spheres take
that a bit further. Earth gets virtually all its energy from the
Sun, but less than a billionth of the Sun’s energy falls on Earth and even if you throw
in every planet and asteroid in our solar system only a fraction of a millionth of the
Sun’s energy lands on them with the rest flying off into the void, totally wasted.
If you wanted harness that energy you would want to surround your entire sun, and we call
this a Dyson Sphere. Now conceptually you can think of it as a single giant rigid spherical
shell around a star but that wasn’t what Freeman Dyson had in mind when he suggested
it nor what scientists mean when discussing it.
We usually mean a massive collection of orbiting bodies, ranging from giant rotating habitats
like we discussed in episode 4 of the megastructures series or huge swarms of solar power collectors.
For this reason you will sometimes hear these called Dyson Swarms instead, to emphasize
that it’s basically a big cloud of smaller objects not one big rigid shell, but for our
purposes today it doesn’t make a difference. Now we’ll discuss some of the things you
might do with all that energy, how you would go about building one, where you’d come
up with all material to build one, and why you would want to build a Dyson Sphere later.
For the moment what matters is that if a civilization wants to keep expanding it can go to other
stars or build up around its own, or both. The Dyson Dilemma hinges on showing they’d
want to do both, could do both, and could do both on a timeline that while very long
to us is very short in the context of the age of the Universe.
The timelines needed for a species to double its own numbers, if it has the inclination
and resources to do so, is incredibly small compared to the timeline of the Universe.
It does not really matter if an organism has generations lasting only a day or a thousand
years, they can fill up space very quickly. It only takes ten generations of doubling,
just a few centuries, to increase your population a thousand-fold. So if a carbon copy of Earth
existed around every yellow sun in the galaxy and we could get people there, we could fill
up all those billions of solar systems in about a thousand years.
The upside of a Dyson Sphere is that a single one of them contains nearly as much living
area as an entire galaxy. Our own population quadrupled during the last century, doubling
basically every fifty years, but even if it took a thousand years to double we’d have
a billion times as many people, enough to fill a Dyson Sphere or a galaxy of Earth-like
planets, in only 30,000 years. For contrast, if you took a film of the galaxy
from when the Universe was young until now, and ran it at high speed so it played out
in an hour, you could miss the whole of human history by blinking, and if you blinked again
when such an expansion was going on, even a slow one, you could be looking at a lone
inhabited planet when you started that second blink and an entire filled galaxy when you
were done. But if they’ve been building Dyson Spheres around every star as they went,
you wouldn’t see anything since all the stars in a galaxy would be obscured by the
Dyson Spheres. Even restrained by the Speed of Light you
can fill up a galaxy in just a hundred thousand, maybe a few millions years. And if travel
time is your bottleneck to expansion your population growth could move at a glacial
pace and still keep up with it. That’s the Dyson Dilemma in short, if an
expanding civilization has the ability and desire to spread out to other stars and slowly
englobe each one with a Dyson Sphere until you can’t see any stars at all, and even
if they take tens of millions of years to do this, that is such a short period of time
compared to how old the Universe is that you’d expect tons of civilizations to have already
done this. They could have encircled every star in the
galaxy and even moved on to other galaxies, but even if no one in our galaxy had reached
that point yet or arrived from elsewhere, we’d still be able to see half-eaten galaxies
billions of light years away. We could see that going on so far away that we can actually
discount the more distant locations simply because the light we see from them is so old
we wouldn’t expect anything to have had a chance to evolve there yet.
But obviously we don’t. Same as with radio signals from other civilizations
we’ve never found a single Dyson Sphere, let alone countless millions of them.
We can draw two different but reasonable conclusions off this. First, they aren’t there because
there’s no one there to build them. Either technological civilizations evolve incredibly
rarely or they kill themselves off long before being able to build such things, a concept
we explored in the Fermi Paradox Apocalypse How video, where we tried to look at every
plausible doomsday scenario for technological civilizations and which we’ll be looking
at again soon in the Carter Doomsday Argument video.
So civilizations able to build these might be very rare or short-lived.
The second option is that they either can’t build them or don’t wish to do so.
We’ll be focus our attention on that idea, and the problems with it, for the rest of
the video, but first one quick side note. I mentioned that you couldn’t see these
stars because they’re surrounded, but that’s not quite true and the source of a lot of
confusion about Dyson Spheres. They’re not invisible, just invisible to the naked eye.
Objects that absorb energy, like light from a sun, will begin to warm up, they will also
radiate energy away. The hotter they are, the faster they radiate
heat, double something’s temperature, its absolute temperature, and it will pump out
16 times the radiated heat, it will also emit that at a frequency or wavelength of light
dependent on the temperature. Things at room temperature, like planets with liquid water,
or artificial habitats constructed to house people, will radiate their heat away in a
frequency of light invisible to the naked eye but quite visible to our modern equipment
and every bit as much power will leave them as they absorb.
Dyson Spheres tend to be a pretty popular type of suggested Dark Matter, that doesn’t
work for a whole host of reasons but it mostly comes from the false impression these things
are completely dark, when in reality a Dyson Sphere is about the least subtle thing a civilization
could ever build. The only way you could hide on would be with the sorts of entropy-defying
technology that would render one a bit redundant, but more on that in a while. Summary version,
they can’t be seen with the naked eye but are as easy to see as any other star.
So can you build one of these? Can you get to other stars to build more of them? And
would you want to? I’m going to lay out six conditions that
if true make the Dyson Dilemma function, though as we’ll see in most cases where you could
break these conditions it doesn’t really alter the situation much. We’ll lay these
conditions out then explore their justification and possible flaws, I’ve switched them up
a bit from the original video to be a bit clearer and more comprehensive. Condition #1: It is actually possible to build
a Dyson Sphere, and doing so makes sense. Obviously if you can’t build one, or have
no reason to, the whole Dilemma is redundant. We’ll talk about how you can build one in
a bit as well as why you would build one. Condition #2: It is possible to engage in
interstellar colonization. This is interesting because science-fiction
tends to imply a Dyson Sphere is way-high tech and far harder to build then to go terraform
planets in other solar systems, which is pretty much wrong in every respect, but it means
people tend to assume if you can do #1 then you can do #2 as well.
But for our purposes, if you can’t get to other stars it also breaks the Dyson Dilemma
because unless alien civilizations are incredibly common we could actually miss a Dyson Sphere
even fairly close to us at the galactic scale, and the premise of this concept is that we
would see huge emerging dark spheres, or infrared spheres, of stars disappearing as they got
encompassed in a slowly expanding wave, even galaxies away.
Condition #3: No method of power generation exists which is vastly superior to stars,
nor can matter and energy simply be summoned from nowhere for free.
Now what I mean by this is basically perpetual motion machines and free lunches. The purpose
of building a Dyson Sphere is to tap into all that energy that’s already being produced.
If you’ve got something that’s better, and so much better you wouldn’t even care
about the free energy a star emits, then you’ve wouldn’t build one. Though as we’ll see
in most cases this would result in even larger and more visible civilizations.
Condition #4: Faster Than Light Travel or Travel to other Realities or Dimensions, is
either not possible or not incredibly easy. Again the premise is that we’d see solar
system after solar system disappearing in a loose sphere or blob, because they want
those solar systems and they grab the nearest ones first. If you can just step into some
alternate reality that hosts an uninhabited carbon copy of your homeworld, you don’t
really need to expand off world. Certain types of Faster Than Light travel
also wouldn’t produce that expanding blob, more on that in a while. Our last two conditions
are more psychological than scientific. Condition #5: Civilizations do not inevitably
wipe themselves out. That’s an important caveat because if you
kill yourself off it’s sort of hard to colonize a galaxy. This condition doesn’t mean no
civilizations self-destruct, just that it isn’t inevitable.
Condition #6: Most civilizations will expand their population, territory, and resources
if they can comfortably do so. This tends to be the most controversial part
of the list, I’m not quite sure why, most folks nod their heads and say duh, but it
does seem to rub a very vocal minority the entirely wrong way so I’ll save that for
last and for the moment just point out the emphasis on ‘comfortably do so’.
So let’s discuss these conditions and see how they can be true and what it means if
they aren’t. Condition #1 I think bugs folks because they
have that image of a Dyson Sphere as a giant rigid shell requiring super-technologies,
what I tend to call Clarketech, to build, and access to vast amounts of raw materials.
None of which is true. Building Dyson Swarms isn’t high-tech at all, and while it’s
a massive project, so is building homes for a few hundred million people. Building homes
and factories and farms is something you do gradually with an ever increasing pool of
manpower to help and fundamentally that is what a Dyson Swarm is. Also unlike the rigid
sphere version, you can build it gradually. You start with a few components and just keep
adding to it as need demands and you stop when you’re using up all your sunlight.
Individual components of a Dyson Swarm could be almost anything. Rotating habitats that
simulate conditions on Earth or giant computer processors for some swollen Artificial Intelligence.
Swarms of power collectors. They don’t have to be very sophisticated, it could literally
just be endless wads of modern solar panels. Anything that takes sunlight and converts
it into something we want. There’s no risk of collision of these elements
either, none of them generate much gravity and while we think of these swarms as being
very dense in order to get every trickle of sunlight, that ignores that space is very
big and three dimensional. In this model I’ve got up we’re seeing
a few hundred objects all tightly packed, in reality we’d be talking trillions of
objects all separate by huge distances. Solar Panels don’t need to be in the Habitable
Zone of a solar system to function but the Habitable zone, the area where you have liquid
water, is very wide, especially when the things in them are artificial and can have non-spherical
geometries. You’d probably build your swarm up as one
ring of satellites at a time, cocked at angles. If the whole thing was compacted into a shell
it might be a few millimeters or a few meters thick, but you will be spreading that over
a depth of tens of millions of miles. Even a really dense Swarm would be about as dense
compared to air as air is to lead. Now you might need to give things the occasional corrective
shove or blast some space debris with lasers but you’ve got the entire power output of
star to work with so it’s not hard to do that.
The other issue is what you do with all that power. The default use is to just light artificial
habitats, but there’s lots of applications, we talked about using stars to make micro-black
holes to power starships recently on the channel, but another application addresses the other
big issue of making a Dyson Sphere, which is where you get all the mass.
Now again, a Dyson doesn’t necessarily require much mass. If you’ve got millimeter thick
solar panels surrounding a sun at the distance Mercury is from the Sun, then Mercury alone
would have enough mass. That gets you your solar panels. As to where you get the mass
for thicker stuff like Rotating Habitats, once you run out raw materials from among
the planets and asteroids orbiting the Sun, well, you use the Sun itself.
The Sun out masses everything in the solar system by a couple orders of magnitude, by
a couple more if you are only counting rocky worlds with metal not gas giants, and it get
its power from turning hydrogen into helium by fusion. Something we’d like to be able
to do ourselves at a more compact scale as we discussed in the video on the Impact of
Fusion. You can also turn helium into carbon, the
stuff we make all those cool new super materials like Graphene and Carbon Nantoubes out of.
Many older stars do exactly that as they run out of Hydrogen in their cores. We may well
be able to turn hydrogen into helium for an energy profit ourselves in the not too distant
future and eventually be able to make energy by fusing even heavier elements into things
like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, iron, and so on.
Our big problem right now isn’t that we can’t turn hydrogen into helium, or transmute
other elements, we do it in the lab all the time, our problem is we have to spend way
more energy doing it then we get out of it. It takes a lot of energy by our current methods
to make heavier elements from lighter ones… of course if you’ve got all the energy of
a sun to play with and you need those heavier elements so you can have more than mostly
solar panels, well, the solution is pretty obvious.
No process is too inefficient if you’ve got a massive surplus of power you’re not
using for anything else. So you could convert Jupiter or Saturn into carbon bit by bit to
build stuff from. But you can also pull matter straight off
a sun. There’s a few ways to do this but the common concept is called starlifting,
which is basically where you use a star’s own power output to magnetically pull off
gas from its upper atmosphere which would constantly replenish from the compacted hot
gases below. This is killing two birds with one stone since
you can convert that matter into stuff that can more practically take advantage of all
that light, while decreasing the star’s mass to make it live longer and glow less
brightly, meaning you don’t need as much material to properly Dyson it.
In fact smaller stars not only live longer but are more efficient too, with the smallest
ones converting virtually all their hydrogen into helium and energy whereas the big ones
often die before converting even a tenth of it.
So you if don’t have enough mass in a solar system to do much more than make thin solar
collectors around your sun, you can yank matter right off the star to reduce its brightness,
meaning you don’t need as much mass to encompass it, while giving you more material to encompass
it with more useful constructs. Ideally your means of transmutation would
produce energy for you to use too, but if you’ve got to just have a big supercollider
running around your star slamming atoms together to make bigger ones at a hugely inefficient
rate, so be it, it’s not like that power would be used for anything else.
All the energy is forever lost and unusable. It’s hard for me to imagine advanced civilizations,
even ones that didn’t want more of themselves, not grinding and gnashing their teeth at that
waste. Energy that could be used for anything from making artificial habitats for nature
reserves of endangered animals to being stored for eventual use when the star dies.
On any given star there would eventually be a nice comfortable optimum between the mass
you needed to build the Dyson you want around it and the brightness is had. Sounds really
high tech, and hopefully it would be too since again our current methods of transmutation
are very wasteful, but it’s not something you need new physics for.
Same for the construction process. There’s nothing high tech there, though more tech
is better. Can you make a satellite and put it in orbit around the Sun? Yes. Great, now
make a trillion them, you’ve got a Dyson Swarm.
You need a real off-planet infrastructure to do this stuff, but mining and building
in space is not tricky, it’s getting the initial components up there to begin with
that’s tricky. We looked at some ways of doing in the early episodes of the Megastructures
series. Space Elevators, Orbital Rings, Skyhooks, Mass Drivers, Launch Loops, and Space Fountains
all hold a lot of promise and you can click on that video link if you want to learn more.
Like all the other video links on this channel they just pause this video and open the other
one up in a new window. So that’s condition #1 settled. You can
build a Dyson, you just do it as resources and need permit and require. The motivation
for doing so is simply that you want to use all that otherwise wasted power, what you
use it for would depend on what you want. Even if you’re non-expansionist you can
always use that power to store it for the super long-term usage, we previously discussed
using black holes as massive batteries that will last as long compared to stars as stars
do to light bulbs, but there’s several mundane ways to store energy long term, not as efficient
but even 1% efficiency is better than nothing at all.
So even if you don’t want the power now, that is one example of how you could use it
just prolong your civilization long after our sun and every other one had burned out.
Not every hypothetical civilization we’ll consider today resembles our own, the Dyson
Dilemma works just fine even if the civilization is one massive single artificial super-intelligence,
often called a Matryoshka Brain, that just runs ridiculous amounts of computing power
off a whole sun. Condition #2 was that Interstellar Colonization
is possible. We did a whole video on that not long back so I’ll keep discussion of
that short now. You can watch that for explanations of how Interstellar Colonization should be
viable even if we never invent any cool new physics that makes it way easier.
It’s also very easy to get the power to send colony ships when you already have a
Dyson Swarm in place, or even just part of Dyson Swarm. In that video we discussed a
lot of options, and we extended on that in the Black Hole Starship video, but the simplest
one that definitely would work if you had a lot of solar collectors around you sun is
just to shove your ships up to a good fraction of light speed with lasers powered by those
collectors slamming off mirrors on the back of the ship. Though slowing down at your destination
is a bit of a problem. We looked at a lot of the other options for
doing this in the Interstellar Colonization video, including how to slow down, but if
you’ve got a decent start on building a Dyson Swarm you can get the job done. It might
take a century for your colony ships to arrive and Terraforming a Planet is pretty time consuming
too, as we discussed in the video on that, but centuries and even thousands of years
are nothing in the context of astronomical time
And I repeat that point a lot because it tends to be the big conceptual problem people have
with the Fermi Paradox. We’ll come back to this point in a bit and talk about the
Hart Conjecture of the mid 70’s, which the Dyson Dilemma is sort of an extension of,
and the concept that mostly blunted SETI as a major endeavor.
Condition #3 revolves around basically eliminating Dyson Spheres as useful objects. Fundamentally
the point of a Dyson Sphere is to convert stars into useful engines for whatever purpose.
If you’ve got way better sources of power and materials than stars you probably wouldn’t
bother to build one. Now that would have to involve new physics, physics that if it exists
at all we don’t understand at all, so there’s not much point talking about it except in
two regards. We can’t really speculate much about weird
new physical laws we don’t even have a theoretical basis for, but if you’ve got ways to just
ignore entropy you don’t need stars anymore and you actually can hide your civilization
and you don’t need to expand because you basically have infinite resources available
already. But this is a problem in the Fermi Paradox
because you also have no reason to hide either. No one else has a motivation to expand, and
you might as well just broadcast off your trick for cheating thermodynamics so everybody
knows it and has no reason to expand and threaten you.
If they’ve got the same trick, they don’t need to expand either, whereas if they don’t
they do, and they might come kicking on your door in anger just for withholding the technique,
a conundrum we’ll talk about more in the Companion video looking at other Fermi Paradox
Solutions. If you gain nothing by attacking others, you
need a motivation like revenge to drive you on, like for instance “Those selfish, apathetic
bastards didn’t share their super-technology with us when doing so would have saved countless
lives and cost them nothing.” This wouldn’t mean they never left home.
With those kinds of power resources travel between stars wouldn’t be hard, and they
might just be curious. We are, that’s kind of how we got all our technology to begin
with. Curiosity might not be a universal trait of
technological civilizations but it’s hard to imagine it is a rare one, and an ultra-energy
rich civilization with no plausible fear of other civilizations that possess curiosity
ought to be fairly chatty with its neighbors. As mentioned, we’ll talk about that concept
more in the companion video where we survey the various other solutions to the Fermi Paradox.
Alternatively if you still have to obey normal physical laws but just have some way better
power source, like being able to convert matter directly into energy, then you actually worsen
the Dyson Dilemma, since expansion is much easier, and you still have a motivation to
do it. You wouldn’t Dyson Swarm your own sun, but
it would still go dark since you’d want to disassemble it for fuel, now or in the
distant future. Plus such a civilization would still glow very bright in the infrared region,
probably brighter than a normal Dyson Swarm would, so ultimately only entropy-violating
technology really gets you out of the Dyson Dilemma and Condition #3 ends up holding even
for most technologies that violate our known physical laws.
Either by replacing Dyson Spheres with even more visible objects or by creating a situation
in which there’s no reason to be silent. Condition #4 is much the same. The new series
on the Channel about hypothetical Faster Than Light Technologies, FTL, looks at this subject
in more detail, though I like to be upfront with viewers that I personally don’t think
real FTL is in the cards. It bugs people when I suggest we can build star-encompassing megastructures
but that the Millennium Falcon is out of our reach, but it’s a Great Wall of China versus
Jetpack kind of thing. One, while it certainly benefits from higher
technology, is really just about manpower and effort, the other requires breakthroughs
that might be a long time coming or never. There are some promising leads that let us
maybe cheat the speed of light, and we talk about them in the FTL series, but for the
purpose of this video FTL is an example of where even if you’ve got it then it actually
exacerbates the Fermi Paradox. If you can get to stars in days not decades,
Interstellar Colonization is pretty much a given and you can fill up a galaxy quite quickly.
This doesn’t eliminate the need for Dyson Spheres though, it just delays it for a while.
Once you’ve filled up all the decent planets you’d still need to build Dyson Spheres
if you want to expand more, and that would still probably happen as an expanding sphere
as the homeworld and oldest colonies near it fill up first and opt to build Dyson’s.
The exception to that is any type of FTL that doesn’t even care about distance. If you
can just pop anywhere you want regardless of how far away it is then you pick the most
Earth-like uninhabited planets in the whole Universe and that wouldn’t result in that
expanding Sphere of Darkness. On the other hand if you’ve got super-easy
transport anywhere you probably have very rapid colonization and expansion since for
a long while there’s no motivation to curb population growth at all and absolutely no
way to enforce it. So you wouldn’t get the expanding sphere but you would get massive
population growth everywhere and even 2 people, ignoring the inbreeding issues, could fill
the whole Universe up with their descendants in less time than it took for us to go from
stone spears to steam engines. Then they’d have to turn to Dyson Spheres.
This is actually one of the major reasons I’m dubious about FTL ever being possible,
I can imagine that intelligent life is pretty rare, and that the nearest ones are so far
away the light from their emerging civilization hasn’t reached us yet, but the whole Universe
has to come into play if you’ve got FTL, and maybe the whole timeline of the Universe
since FTL also usually implies time travel. Our current physics calls it outright impossible,
and it’s easier for me to imagine us never having FTL workarounds that let us get to
places we’ve never been to before faster than light than that the whole Universe, which
is way bigger than even the Observable Universe if not actually outright infinite in size,
never gave rise to anyone else besides us. Though we’ll look at that possibility in
the companion video as well. The real killer for the Dyson Dilemma from
condition #4 is if anyone ever figures out a way to pop into alternate realities, if
they exist. Because then there is a virtually infinite and possible literally infinite number
of copies of your own world that are the same except nobody lives there yet. You don’t
bother building Dyson Spheres or Terraforming planets if you’ve got an infinite number
of Earths at your finger tips. You might still have a very impressive space
program since you’d also have all those worlds to draw resources and funding from,
but it will be for science, and prestige efforts. You might travel to the South Pole just to
prove you can do it, but you never try to make it livable if you’ve got lots of nicer
places that are also closer at hand. So no expansion wave, you might big build transmitters
and dishes to try talking to or listening for alien civilizations, but there’s no
galaxy encompassing outward expansion wave. And again, if you’re not expanding, then
the Dyson Dilemma isn’t really applicable. The issue with finding aliens and not being
able to hear them right now isn’t an issue if they are staying homebound unless you think
that alien civilizations are so common there are millions of them in this galaxy. We could
miss a carbon copy of our own civilization even just a thousand light years away and
they could miss us. That detection range is constantly expanding but it’s still pretty
small right now, on a galactic scale. That’s the concept for SETI, ultimately,
and why the Hart Conjecture damaged that effort so much. And it is the Hart Conjecture that
the Dyson Dilemma ultimately revolves around. Back in the earlier 50’s when the Fermi
Paradox was first raised we were just learning how huge and old the Universe was, we didn’t
have any space program at all, and we were mass producing nukes as the Cold War got started.
Nor did we have anything like the telescopes we now have. So at the time the answer seemed
pretty obvious, civilizations have their homeworld and they are stuck on it, for good or ill,
and those tended to be rather pessimistic times right after two world wars and the invention
of nukes. Enrico Fermi, for whom the paradox is named,
is also known as the architect of the nuclear age and the atomic bomb, and he was also firmly
opposed to construction of the H-bomb, so he wasn’t noted for his optimism about mankind’s
long-term survivability. Now by the mid-70’s there was a bit more
optimism. Man had walked on the moon, we hadn’t nuked ourselves, and we had some very tangible
theoretical designs and models for not just interplanetary but interstellar spaceships.
So we had to start taking very seriously the notion that interstellar colonization might
be feasible. Astrophysicist Michael Hart wrote a very pivotal
paper that actually spawned the Fermi Paradox as an official concept and term, and it was
called the Fermi-Hart Paradox for some time. I’ve attached a link to that paper in the
video description below that you can read but the summary form, and what it means, is
basically that since it appears alien civilizations could have arisen millions or even billions
of years ahead of, and since Interstellar colonization seems possible, then our problem
isn’t that we can’t hear radio signals from distant alien homeworlds, is that we
can’t hear them from the leading edge of their colonization expansion wave or that
we’re even here to listen since malicious aliens might have just taken our planet back
when animals living on land was become all the new fashion. And sure, nice aliens might
leave our planet alone but they ought to have a pretty close and easily observed outpost
we could hear, not just their distant homeworld. A few years later Frank Tipler added onto
this, with what is known as the Hart Tipler Conjecture, and basically just amounts to
pointing out that automated probes with construction ability made interstellar colonization even
easy, something miniaturization and 3D printing would strongly indicate is so. The notion
of using robots as some kind of groundbreaking concept might seem a bit alien nowadays but
remember this was when computers smaller a car that you could play tic-tac-toe was still
considered brand new. The big weakness of SETI, and the source of
a lot of criticism towards it, tends to be this concept though, that if alien civilizations
are around it’s not their homeworlds we need to look for, it’s their nearest colonies,
which ought to be everywhere by now if even one civilization had arisen in the galaxy
even just a few million years ahead of us. Of course they might all be dead, having never
expanded and not have transmitted radio signals for very long. Which brings us to condition
#5. Condition #5, the notion that species don’t
inevitably wipe themselves out, was something we looked at in detail in the Fermi Paradox
Apocalypse How video, and we saw there that actually taking a civilization out for keeps
was a lot harder than we tend to think. But in the context of the Fermi Paradox it doesn’t
matter if some do blow themselves up, it matters if some don’t.
If a thousand civilization arose in our galaxy in the last billion years, it would only have
taken one of them not killing themselves off and going on to expand, or even just not killing
themselves off but deciding expansion wasn’t viable but a great big radio transmitter was,
to break the Great Silence. And if expansion isn’t viable then you don’t need to be
afraid of someone kicking your door down and taking your planet since they can’t, so
you might as well talk to others. The key word in condition 5 is inevitable,
because a thousand civilizations coming into existence over a billion years in our galaxy
is actually pretty pessimistic odds for development, since there probably being tens of millions
of near replicas of Earth-like planets life might have spawned on in our galaxy alone.
Yet the Dyson Dilemma goes beyond our galaxy to encompass any close enough for us to be
able to have received light from that galaxy which isn’t so old no planets there could
have plausibly developed civilizations when that light left. Even if you’re on the pessimistic
side about technological civilizations emerging, say just one per galaxy so far, that’s a
lot of galaxies in range, millions of them, and it’s hard to imagine civilizations kill
themselves off even 99% of the time, which would still mean at only one per galaxy and
only 1% surviving that many thousands had done so that we could see.
And keep in mind, it only counts for the Fermi Paradox if the obliteration results in no
intelligent life with any desire to expand remaining. So a hyper-aggressive artificial
intelligence that wipes out its creators doesn’t count any more than our replacement of Neanderthals
does. Again we go over this in more detail in the
Apocalypse How video but for our purposes so long as any decently non-zero percentage
of civilizations survive it doesn’t work for the Fermi Paradox.
This leads us to our last condition, #6. Most civilizations will expand their population,
territory, and resources if they can comfortably do so.
I’ve never heard a good counterargument to this, and I’m quite receptive to them
since even though the Dyson Dilemma is my own brainchild I actually despise it, I detest
the notion that the Universe could be so huge and old yet basically empty, so I keep an
ear out for any good challenges to the idea. But so far the closest and most common one
is usually to point out that developed nations have low or even negative birth rates. That
obviously is not a counterargument and I blame myself for not putting the word comfortably
in bold last time. Find me a historic example of where a civilization for at least ten generations
existed well bellowing it’s carrying capacity – which is the maximum population a given
place can support with available technology – and had no growth that entire time and
I will revisit this issue. And remember, well below carrying capacity, which would mean
they could support, with what they had for space and technology, many times what they
did, and had ZERO growth the whole time. If you can’t find one of those then you’ve
no valid contradiction of condition #6. At least not a historical or modern one, and
there certainly isn’t an example in nature, organisms on Earth reproduce even when it’s
not only not comfortable but actively a bad idea to do so. Only the food chain and predators
keep that in check and technological civilizations wouldn’t be expected to have any predators
preying on them. And this being the Fermi Paradox, we still
only care if everyone does it, not if some or even most do it. So even if we could find
a historical example of where a stable civilization had existed for many generations with no growth
when they could comfortably have increased their numbers, it changes little since it’s
the example of any civilization that has grown when it could do so that actually causes the
Dilemma and there’s obviously tons of those. This is made even worse if a civilization
develops means of seriously prolonging lifespans, a concept we’ll examine when we take a look
at Transhumanism & Immortality in the near future. When you live thousands or even millions
of years it’s hard to imagine you wouldn’t want to have a child at least once in all
that time, if there’s no pressing resource shortage to deter you.
When you’re building Dyson Spheres you’re also not knocking over forests, your building
habitats from previously dead rock that forests can grow in. To break condition #6 you need
to show that intelligent civilizations consider a dead asteroid to be more valuable than living
organisms, or digital artificial intelligences, same difference. And you need to show they
all would, because if even one in a million didn’t, then they would rapidly outnumber
the other million civilizations combined. Evolution favors aggressive critters who like
to multiply, and the difference with intelligent creatures is that they will at least consider
curbing their growth when not doing so endangers them as a culture, but the whole point of
condition #6 is that they will grow if it doesn’t endanger them. Nor are all those
rocks in space some sort of eternal stockpile you can tap at need. Orbits decay, flinging
asteroids and planets out into the void or dumping them into stars. Stars themselves
burn through mountains worth of fusion fuel every day and convert that into power that
is forever wasted. It’s not knocking over virgin forest for farmland, its use or lose
resources that diminish every year and serve no purpose unused.
Now there’s no breaks in condition #6 that I’ve heard of, but there are a couple maybes
that get brought up, they don’t appear to work but on initial inspection sound like
they do. The first is that is that civilizations might go digital. Convert yourself into a
computer or get replaced by them. That’s entirely plausible, but it doesn’t really
matter. You ought to be able to support a lot more
people off the same power supply if they’re cyborgs or outright computer programs, growing
food isn’t a terribly efficient process compared to just running yourself on electricity
if you can do it. But sort of like how Faster Than Light travel just delays the Dyson Dilemma
while you fill up easy to reach and terraform planets, you will still get a maximum population
of computer-people. No matter how much more efficient you make
your processing and data storage you will max out eventually and then if you want to
expand more you need to move outwards to empty spaces or import material from elsewhere.
We’ll look at the concept of such societies more in the aforementioned Transhumanism video
and also in the one on the Simulation Hypothesis, the notion that we might all live inside a
giant computer program, but it doesn’t change that if you want more people, you eventually
need external resources. And why would you not want more people? More
artists, more scientists, more actors and musicians and novelists and great thinkers.
But a better way of looking at it would be would you be willing to kill to stop it? Because
even if you and most of your civilization likes your total population just as it is,
unless that opinion is universally held by every member of your civilization… and every
other civilization… you’d have to be willing to actually chase down and blow up any rebellious
members of your civilization guilty of wanting to setup shop elsewhere. Or somebody is going
to do it and odds are their descendants will share their expansionist preferences.
Of course it could be a single mind, the giant planet-sized or sun-sized computer. And it
might have no desire to reproduce, it doesn’t want to send a seed to another solar system
to become a rival. That still doesn’t really matter though because it just announced a
motivation, it doesn’t want a rival, meaning it probably wants to live.
Which could probably be taken for granted since while biological organisms have survival
built in, and would probably transmit that as part of their cultural mindset and ideology
even to non-biological descendants, it’s kind of hard to imagine survival-oriented
civilizations being wiped out by an entity or entities that weren’t survival oriented.
And in that motivation, especially for some giant super-mind, we get the same expansion
wave. It’s life is really measured not in classic time but in total processes done,
Flops or Floating Point Operations, but either way, the more calculation power it has and
the longer it can run them, the better, and I already mentioned how things like black
holes can be used to store power for insane periods of time even compared to solar lifetimes.
You don’t need full-blown human level intelligence on your robot probes sent out to strip mine
other solar systems to bring those resources back to your hoard, and you can even make
a Dysons Swarm out of stars. Not only can you use a star’s own power
to pull mass off it, you can use a star’s own power to move it. All Dyson Spheres are
starships. Very slow ones, but you can reflect your sunlight or waste heat or both asymmetrically
rather than omnidirectionally to provide thrust. There all sorts of ways you can harvest your
galaxy and crunch it in to a smaller volume for long term storage, just from available
known science, so if you’re a big omnibrain who just wants to live as long as you can
hoping to figure out an ultimate cheat code for entropy and the heat death of the Universe,
sending non-sentient robots to harvest everything in sight for your hoard will do the trick.
And the same for any other civilization too. A culture might decide it only wants X number
of people and really will kill off anyone who tries to flee to found a new colony, maybe
they fear physical or ideological mutation will ultimately spawn an enemy, but that doesn’t
stop them from wanting to persist as long as possible and harvesting the galaxy remotely,
and such a reverse blockade, keeping anyone from leaving, is much easier to enforce if
you’ve got millions of semi-intelligent robotic harvesting fleets roaming the galaxy
who can notice, attack, monitor, or report anyone who managed to sneak away.
So that’s the Dyson Dilemma, fundamentally the concept that while life might be incredibly
common in the Universe, technological civilizations are probably so rare and spread out that there
are none even within a billion light years of us. The biggest point of evidence for it
being that we can see stars with our own eyes. Why this should be, that technological civilizations
are so rare, the Dyson Dilemma doesn’t answer, and we will look at that a bit more properly
in the companion video. Over in the comprehensive solutions companion
video we’ll take a look at a lot of the other proposed Fermi Paradox solutions and
look at their strengths and weaknesses, but that’s it for this topic today
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