The Fermi Paradox: Late Filters

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There were enough close calls during the Cold War that nuclear war could be a GREAT FILTER. And we are not completely out of that hazard yet. In fact the longer nuclear war is delayed the harder rebooting the industrial era might be as more of the juiciest and most low hanging fossil fuel fruit are burnt off. Battery technology is only just get to the point where a solar electric powered industry could work. Nuclear fusion reactors could provide plenty of clean energy and interstellar engines but they could also be used to create plenty of neutrons for breeding plutonium from uneniched uranium.

👍︎︎ 6 👤︎︎ u/mrmonkeybat 📅︎︎ Nov 21 2019 🗫︎ replies

Is it just me, or do the subtitles on this video look weird? Perhaps automatically generated, not edited? :-?

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/sg_plumber 📅︎︎ Nov 22 2019 🗫︎ replies

As some others have suggested a hugely important late filter is fossil fuel depletion. This topic deserves a video all of its own. Our civilization is still completely dependent on them, and they are already dangerously depleted. It would be much harder to develop a potentially space faring civilization without them.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/Cristoff13 📅︎︎ Nov 22 2019 🗫︎ replies

One late filter is the simulation hypothesis. Also the energies required for interstellar travel are hard to control, requiring massive government regulation which isn't very efficient. Trust in government doesn't come easily.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/tomkalbfus 📅︎︎ Nov 21 2019 🗫︎ replies
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This episode is sponsored by Audible The galaxy appears to be rich in worlds and resources ripe for the taking—but it doesn’t appear that anyone has done so. Could it be that some tragedy eventually befalls all those who try? So today we return to the Fermi Paradox Great Filters series for a look at Late Filters, challenges that might prevent civilizations such as ours from ever moving out into the galaxy, and thus preventing us from detecting them. The Fermi Paradox is the big question of how space can be so huge and ancient and yet apparently not populated by any civilization we can detect. In this series we’ve looked at one popular solution to this paradox, that the pathway from potentially habitable world to an advanced civilization like ours is far more difficult than we often think, and that many hidden perils, what we call Filters, might lower the odds at each step of progress. Any potential Fermi Paradox solution has to explain why we see a Universe empty of advanced civilizations that we can detect using the methods we have now. It could be that life rarely emerges or that life emerges but rarely gets more advanced than algae. It could be that disaster befalls worlds, setting them back or sterilizing them, and we’ve just been very lucky. It could be that evolution just doesn’t often produce complex brains capable of abstract thought, let alone spacecraft design. It could be that many planets have intelligent animal life that haven’t built any radios, which means we couldn’t currently detect them. But we certainly could detect civilizations that had expanded to the stars in a big and bold way. They’d be immense and long-lasting and hard to wipe out even if entire planets or solar systems were destroyed. But of course, we ourselves haven’t expanded into the galaxy yet either. So as much as we might hope that we’ve cleared the big hurdles, and that they’re behind us now, and that it will be smooth sailing from here on out, it’s still entirely possible that more major, possibly insurmountable hurdles, the Late Filters, lie ahead of us. Late Filters are the hurdles between a crudely spacefaring civilization like ourselves and achieving a future among the stars. The two big ones we’ll discuss are the many opportunities for a civilization to destroy itself before reaching the stars, and the possibility that they’ll simply lack the means and desire to colonize the galaxy. We’ll also look at some of the stranger, less often discussed reasons why either of these Late Filters might occur. We should also note from the outset that we don’t necessarily have to establish that any of these Late Filters are the sort of thing that gets every single civilization, if we’re assuming all those prior filters have already winnowed down the pool so much that there aren’t a lot of civilizations who have reached the point where they will confront these late filters. On the other hand, since we have no data to work with on those earlier filters, we do need to consider the possibility that life could be incredibly common, popping up in virtually any warm chemical soup on any vaguely supportive planet or moon, but then get swept aside by these Late Filters. Such a Universe might be one in which our galaxy is host to a billion worlds covered in the wreckage of fallen civilizations, a nightmarish thought that seems like something H.P. Lovecraft would write about, which is an appropriate thought since that will be next week’s episode. Now for that first Late filter, being self-destruction, we’ve spent a lot of time on the show talking about potential apocalypses and found that most standard ones don’t hold up under inspection. You can reference those episodes, particularly Fermi Paradox Apocalypse How, 5 Ways the World Could End, Cyclic Apocalypses, and Machine Rebellion for most of the usual suspects like Nuclear War, Climate Change, Supernovae, Gamma Ray Bursts, and Artificial Intelligence. In general though, we’ve found they don’t make good candidates for successfully eliminating the dominant species - or at least doing so in a way that matters to the Fermi Paradox. A race of intelligent machines wiping us out, for instance, is certainly a concern for humanity, but mostly doesn’t matter to the Fermi Paradox because it just replaces one civilization with another. The extinction of the Neanderthals or some other early hominid is not a Fermi Paradox solution, because it just resulted in the rise of another species of intelligent critter, or a hybrid there of. We’ve also looked in previous episodes at the second Late Filter a lot, our ability to get out to the stars and why we should. The primary episodes on this would be our Generation Ships series, which details some of the actual nuts and bolts of making the journey and getting the job done when you arrive. You can also refer to the Life in a Space Colony series or the Outward Bound series, with the latter mostly focused on the colonization and terraforming aspects. If the filter is about being willing and able to go out and colonize the galaxy, then we have to establish that it’s something we can do and would wish to do, and that many other civilizations would too. All of these episodes and series combine to give us our default view on the show: that the late filters might exist, but do not seem likely to be strong barriers. Many, even most, advanced civilizations might be stopped by them, though I suspect in truth few would be, but more importantly, the odds just wouldn’t seem so bad. It’s hard to imagine that they could explain the Fermi Paradox without first assuming the early filters have already done most of the weeding, leaving only a handful of worlds out of the billions in this galaxy to ever have developed advanced civilizations. Now of course there are some assumptions about space travel getting much easier in that reasoning, and that’s why we’ve done whole series of episodes explaining how we might go about interstellar colonization, even without needing any new physics. Indeed, while it would be incredibly expensive, we could do it even now by using nuclear bombs as the propellant. This is also why the Fermi Paradox didn’t even used to be a paradox. Back in Fermi’s day, when he was helping design nuclear weapons and we had yet to draw up a serious plan for getting men on the moon, the notion that a species might nuke themselves to smithereens at some point seemed a lot more realistic than the idea that they might settle planets around alien suns, the nearest of which are millions of times further away than the Moon. If you go back only a couple generations before that, there was no paradox because our civilization really hadn’t absorbed the idea that there were countless other worlds out there that might have been kicking around and evolving life for longer than our world. The paradox started emerging as we began seeing realistic pathways to the stars, while simultaneously living under the threat of doomsday for decades without it happening. The more those paths into the void emerged and took clearer form, the more time that went by without us obliterating ourselves, the less likely the Late Filters seemed. While we can still see ourselves failing in these regards, it no longer seems like some inevitable thing that would get every civilization that arose. Alternatively, we know that a desire to explore and expand are not likely to be peculiar and unique characteristics of humanity, but a characteristic we’d expect most civilizations to have. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine an evolutionary pathway that wouldn’t favor at least some expansionist tendencies, nor a technological civilization arising that didn’t value curiosity. But without any data to back that up, we only have educated guesses and intuition. These might be such high hurdles to leap that they cause the galaxy to be crowded with ruined worlds or isolated planets who never managed to find the will or the ability to venture forth. That doesn’t mean that aliens would all be habitual invaders of course, just that in order to build a civilization you probably at least had a tendency to settle new available lands when you find any. So let’s look at the less obvious pathways those two filters might take. We can of course come up with any number of hypothetical cataclysms that might ruin us; we never know what wonders or horrors might lurk behind the next door when it comes to technology. But ultimately a strong Filter would require something a civilization is almost guaranteed to discover before they’ve expanded out far enough and set up enough thriving colonies so that the loss of their homeworld does not end them. Some kind of a Suicide Pact Technology which guarantees their own destruction. Generally this would need to be something where its threat could not be known until it was too late, though folks have suggested both nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence as Suicide Pact Technologies, and that in such cases it might not matter if you knew of the threat in advance or not. Generally I don’t feel these make good examples though, even ignoring those specific cases, because if folks are aware of the threat, then it stands to reason that at least some civilizations would avoid their use. Though excessive caution could lead to scientific inhibition too. Recall the recent concerns about the Large Hadron Collider experiments and black holes eating our planet. A willingness to embrace risk in science and technology is likely necessary for achieving advanced technology, so any species that gets to our point might be naturally more inclined to take risks or pretend they aren’t big risks, and thus be more vulnerable to Suicide Pact Technologies. However, examples of unknown threats might come from something like trying to develop a faster than light engine, which almost invariably involves messing around with spacetime in a way that would violate causality, where effects would end up preceding the cause. Personally I don’t think such things can work precisely because I don’t think causality can be violated, or that you can travel backward in time, and point to the absence of time travelers as good proof of this. Indeed, if you could travel back in time without erasing the travelers by doing it, any fanatical group who disliked their civilization could opt to colonize Earth a billion years ago, rewriting the future on a young fresh world, instead of some other planet light years away. But other schools of thought suggest that you’d have natural effects that prevented causality violations. An example might be a faster-than-light engine that triggered those forces and resulted in any civilization that tried to use it being deleted backwards in time, erasing all threads of history that led to that FTL drive being developed and erasing everyone who used it, no matter how far they fled. That’s a particularly horrifying Fermi Paradox Late Filter solution, since it might wipe out any trace of those previous failures, meaning no warnings could be spread to others to avoid making the same mistake, or creating worlds in an effective technological groundhog day, with any progress toward space travel deleted from their worldline without them ever knowing it. We see something like that in Isaac Asimov’s classic novel “The End of Eternity”. One way or another, every potential timeline that could lead to discovering the FTL engine gets deleted, and every time they start pursuing a non-FTL approach, someone notices that FTL option and ends up getting the non-FTL option deleted from history too. But of course, if successful FTL research always leads to homicidal Time Lords deleting their own timeline, the only thing that we, on the surviving timelines, would experience would be a universe in which causality and the lightspeed limit just appeared to be absolute and unbreakable according to all of our known physics—which, now that I think about, is exactly like our current situation. Hmmm... Speaking of multiple timelines, we can’t ignore that those might exist and that folks might figure out a way to reach them. The implicit assumption is that you colonize a galaxy because it’s free land, but it takes a lot of work, and you always go for the lowest hanging fruit first. You settle the fertile river delta before the ice cold tundra, so to speak. However, while an exponentially growing population could fill up even our Observable Universe quite quickly, without travel time, alternate timelines and Universes are a different story. A population can double in a single generation easily enough, but if there’s a Universe for every single minor event that could go two ways, I double my Universes much faster than I double my people. Now that’s actually not a good Fermi Paradox solution for reasons we’ve discussed before, most recently in Aloof Aliens. If you can go to these alternate universes and come back, then your homeworld will have near-infinite resources to work with and very little fear of extraterrestrial invasion, particularly as you can offer those same endless worlds to a potential invader looking for growing space with one hand while pointing to the massive armada they could construct with those resources with the other hand. You also wouldn’t bother invading a multi-verse for genocidal reasons since the ability to hop between universes would show that to be futile; you can’t exterminate cultures in the countless other multiverses as there’s always going to be a timeline where you chose not to or failed in the effort. So you’re going to want to either explore the Universe you originated from, or at least build super-powerful transmitters to say “Hi, nice to meet you, we’d love to hear from you and can offer you endless worlds in a cultural exchange. Oh and also, if you’re unfriendly, we can crush you like a gnat.” The flipside, as we mentioned in Aloof Aliens, is that, should hopping universes be a one-way trip, you’d always have folks in your civilization who stayed behind and decided to expand within their original universe. One-way presumably means one-way, meaning you’re not even going to be getting reports back from the folks who made the journey about whether or not they were successful or ended up getting vaporized, so even if the theory works 100% on paper some folks will decide they don’t want to make the trip, and will opt for classic colonization. Now I mentioned a moment ago how even though a population can grow exponentially, the number of possible multiverses presumably branches off and grows even faster so that you can’t really fill them all up, at least in a meaningful sense, and you can see the Infinite Improbability Issues episode for further discussion on that matter. But it raises a good point with apocalypse scenarios. It’s common to point out that any finite probability, given a long enough time, can and will happen. Meaning that even if your civilization only has a 1 in 1000 chance in a given year of sterilizing their planet using either nukes or some more terrible weapon, it is going to happen, and such a cataclysm indeed has a 50/50 chance of happening in 691 years, and only 1 in 22,000 civilizations will survive 10,000 years. However, this reasoning does have a flaw: it assumes a static probability, and that’s rarely the case when intelligent agents are involved. Similar to the number of potential multiverses growing faster than populations do, other related probabilities can multiply too. Your odds of being hit by a planet killing asteroid drop as time goes by because asteroids of those size will mostly be leftovers from the formation of your solar system. Each time one collides with a Jupiter-equivalent or the Sun, fewer are around to hit your world. Many will be ejected from your solar system too, though to be fair, you could also be hit by one ejected from another solar system. The probability decays over time, and thus such a cataclysmic collision isn’t inevitable. Natural disasters also don’t make good Fermi Paradox Late Filter solutions, because it’s a statistically improbable cataclysm. Such major disasters aren’t going to be something that happens with such severity and frequency in a place where life has managed to create civilizations like ours, and so would be unlikely to occur in the period of maybe a few centuries from this point to interplanetary or even interstellar colonies. We’re also more robust to such disasters, when it comes to surviving with at least some remnant able to rebuild, than non-technological civilizations or animals. But more to the point, there’s a fairly limited window of time between now and when we could proof against such threats, and it’s vastly smaller than the time that has already passed without them happening. Assuming an asteroid did kill the dinosaurs off for instance, 65 million years ago, that would not kill us off now, and I’d not be surprised if we were able to detect and prevent such strikes even as early as 65 years from now, a window of time a million times shorter, and thus a million times less probable to occur than it having happened again since then. Also, people like to live, so any threat we can be aware of will tend to get an effort to decrease the threat, and keep decreasing the threat faster than you were essentially rolling the dice. Those could take some interesting turns too. As an example, technologies such as 3D printers could become so advanced that one lone lunatic could fabricate a doomsday device in their basement. Were this true, based on the supposition that on a long enough timeline, anything that can happen will happen, one could argue that any such civilization and its colonies is doomed. Whether or not this is true, it ignores other technological improvements.. However, this is assuming an advanced civilization even contains such lone, homicidal lunatics. Schools of thought on the subject vary, but today we generally assume that psychological conditions are analogous to physical conditions: detectable before turning into homicidal tendencies and either treatable or preventable. Science fiction often contemplates many strange and often unbelievable civilizations, but rarely seems to consider one where insanity is as easily detected and treated as a tooth cavity. There are any number of illnesses that used to wipe us out in droves and we often came to view them as an inevitable part of life until we came to understand them better and were able to cure or prevent them, mental illnesses may turn out to be the same. Few would argue that if we were more intelligent, things probably would be better. Although I do say ‘few’ as many feel ‘ignorance is bliss’ has some truth to it and another Fermi Paradox Late Filter option is that really advanced civilizations tend to suffer from a lot of nihilism, seeing through the illusion of free will and purpose and meaning and just give up. Or that a civilization turns into hedonistic lazy layabouts tended to hand and foot by robots, and we explored that more in our post-Scarcity Civilizations series and our Virtual Worlds episode. Generally such things do not work as Fermi Paradox solutions though, as discussed in those episodes, but in short form, even if we assumed the whole civilization, every single member, went down such a path, which seems unlikely, those same technologies generally permit space expansion before they are sophisticated enough to allow those other paths. As an example, if I can build a robot for farming and manufacturing, I can build one that makes spaceships and orbital habitats. If I can make simulated people in virtual realities sophisticated enough to feel like a decent facsimile of a normal person, to tempt people to dwell in virtual utopias, then I can also make an AI able to run complex manufacturing and space navigation, indeed the latter is easier than the former. Of course many people or civilizations might not be willing to go the virtual route or turn their lives over to robots, even if they weren’t worried about getting killed in some machine rebellion, and they’re likely to pass that preference on to their kids, especially if the groups embracing those technologies all seem to turn into lazy slugs. While killer robots are obviously a potential threat, they don’t make a good Fermi Paradox solution unless they are not too intelligent themselves. Grey goo is an example, a bunch of self-replicating machines that reduce a planet to nothing but more of themselves, but that’s happened before on this planet, the self-replicating machines just happened to be simple biological life, Green Goo. Indeed, that’s arguably happened several times, and the grey goo might evolve intelligence eventually. However a civilization which employs smart machines but is afraid of them might opt for something subhuman and with built in replication controls that prevented mutation. Digital schematics aren’t the same as DNA and it’s not that hard to ensure a replication method whose odds of mutation are vastly lower than in terrestrial organisms. So if they somehow ran amok and murdered us all off, they might never evolve in any significant way even on billion year timelines. The galaxy might be swarming in worlds with lots of machine intelligences of roughly mammal level minds. Indeed, may whole solar systems might be. One of the most obvious AI uses would be asteroid mining and space industry, where you need some brains to handle the light-lag issue of remote control and where self-replicating machines are very handy, see our episode, Void Ecology for some less apocalyptic visions of that future. Controlling an AI though, especially a human-smart one or smarter often involves suggesting some prime directives, Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics being the most famous example, and they’re okay as they go though they’ve got some big weaknesses too and we might do an episode someday playing around with all the horrible loopholes in that and Rob Miles over on Computerphile did a nice breakdown of them some years back that I’d highly recommend. Let me give an example of one scenario that’s a good Late Filter though. Imagine for the moment that many of the technologies we often contemplate on this show come to fruition sooner than later, like radical life extension. Let us also now assume we program the machine to protect humans above all else. Now we could imagine some truly awful scenario where the machine turns every human into some blob-brain in a tank unable to hurt themselves, or perhaps in a Matrix-style tank living in a simulated world, Utopian or not but unable to be harmed. Let us instead assume the programmers were a little bit more careful. This AI is told it must protect all humans, and its charges are effectively immortal or close to it, and it views its charge as protecting every human currently alive. That’s a logical caveat by the way, if you leave potential humans in the mix, then it can justify killing or hurting some people now if it saves more lives down the road. Utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number, can get pretty dark even without including people who don’t even exist yet. Such being the case, that machine only cares about those people alive right now. Now in theory, it would feel the same about anyone else who was born, but, it has no motivation to let anyone else be born because every new person represents a non-zero threat to the other people. This is the same reason you don’t stick an armed Asimovian robot on guard duty on your child, it can’t harm any other humans of course, that’s Asimov’s First Law, but it will turn it’s machine guns on your pets and any local wildlife capable of causing harm to your kid, traumatizing that kid of course but it needs to be pretty smart to know that. This machine doesn’t escape such behavior by being smarter. There is no bigger threat to humans than other humans, and for that matter every other human created further limits the time, attention, and resources it can devote to protecting its current charges. To make that worse though, even if you tell it more people is good, it will not like interstellar colonies. Partially because people separated by centuries of light lag and living under alien suns are rapidly going to turn into aliens themselves, and thus be an alien threat to humans, but at least as much because it will be a threat to us. It has to send out a copy of itself to watch over those colonists, even if it can be convinced they shouldn’t be under its protective oversight somehow, it knows it needs to watch them to make sure they don’t become a threat to the Homeworld as millennia and mutation and cultural divergence take effect and as those colonist are free to multiply until they potentially have all the numbers and resources of a galactic empire to pose such a threat. Rather, it has to be afraid of that copy it sent. Same as the biggest threat to a human is another human, the biggest threat to some AI is another AI with a conflicting agenda. If you’ve got a machine whose primary objective is to keep their person or persons safe, they will strip mine the galaxy to provide all the weapons and defenses needed to do that if able to do so, and two of them with different people to keep safe, if they perceive any probability those goals will be in conflict, might tear a galaxy apart trying to kill each other. That AI back at the homeworld knows that, so it has precious little motivation to go around seeding the galaxy with anything smart enough to ever become a potential threat to its charges back home. Now it could, as we’ve discussed elsewhere, go about strip mining the galaxy with dumber machines that brought resources home, but this is where we get to the notion that some civilizations might choose to stay home and not expand much or at all. Any civilization that draws similar conclusions about adding to their number adding to their risk, or that worlds they settle might be friends down the road but also might be enemies, and that zero chance of enemies is better than a chance at friends, doesn’t have much reason to colonize. You don’t need to cannibalize a whole galaxy to come up with enough resources to ensure your current population can be maintained indefinitely at a high living standard, especially if an alternative cosmology like the Big Rip proves true, as opposed to the current preferred model of the Heat Death of the Universe. For the latter, there’s no such thing as too much resource harvesting because time goes on for such periods that they make a trillion years look like an eyeblink, and we looked at survival methods for keeping a civilization going long after their Sun would have died in our Civilizations at the End of Time series. In a Big Rip scenario you’re existence is on a timer, a very long timer to be sure, but not one so long that you need to pillage a whole galaxy to keep your planet living in vast wealth until the End comes. As Late Filters go, since our normal Dyson Dilemma concept revolves around a desire for expansion or at least resource acquisition, anything that puts a finite and immovable end point on civilization is problematic. This is even more true for any alteration that removes their biological compulsion to have kids. That’s a trait we can expect to be very common of course, species that don’t wish to reproduce even at risk to themselves aren’t going to last long, and civilization-building species aren’t likely to arise from any critters that aren’t willing to cooperate with their own members or sacrifice much to protect their offspring. Strictly logically speaking though, if your own primary goal is personal survival above all else, kids are bad, they cost effort and create competition. Humans are mortal, we die, our kids replace us. We’re not Greek Gods, we don’t eat our kids to keep them from overthrowing us one day. But one could imagine a species with advanced technology that allowed radical life extension feeling otherwise. Indeed a common argument against Fermi Paradox solutions that assume species will be in general aggressive and expansionist to at least some degree is that they may get enlightened out of such behavior, or alter themselves to remove it. Good example of how good intentions can have very bad outcomes, a species that altered itself to not want to be expansionist or reproduce beyond a chosen ‘ideal’ population number might get pretty zealous about that and start embracing the attitude that any additional people represented a clear and present danger to them, which of course they do. Especially in a near-immortal civilization and in a less direct sense, every new person is taking up resources, threatening to push you under them in the social hierarchy, potentially stealing your friends or job or primacy as an expert in your field, or again, simply might kill you. As a positive note, beyond me not thinking this would make a very good Late Filter, such a civilization would still want to expand to some degree, even if just with an automated extermination fleet, to ensure no actual aliens arose as threats, as opposed to daughter colonies turned alien by millennia of separation. Fundamentally like most isolationist policies we look at for the Fermi Paradox, it’s not that some might not choose such a path, it’s that many would not, and also that such paths become far less effective if others choose not to follow them. Your world might be nice and safe from your colonies by not having them, but it’s in a lot of trouble if some other world did have them and starts looking at you as a threat. Which is quite likely considering your most obvious characteristic is that you’re very Xenophobic. As we mentioned in Hidden Aliens, you can’t realistically hide a civilization, so if you want to be left alone you put up big “No Trespassing” signs, and you definitely don’t blow up unwitting intruders if you didn’t put those signs up or other civilizations will send more such intruders, only much less unwitting and much more heavily armed and angry. In the end it’s generally better to expand where you can, so you have more resources to defend yourself with, and not to take any actions which will make your neighbors think you’re basically looking for an excuse to murder them, which is rather heavily implied to be your desired goal if you clearly regard even your own colonists as something you shouldn’t have because they might hurt you. Paranoia is not a desirable trait in your neighbors. So it seems the best defense against the plausible Late Filters is just Pragmatism. Anyone who can build mighty high-tech civilizations is generally going to put real effort into foreseeing future problems and planning contingencies. For facing unpredictable threats, the most pragmatic plan is to simply have tons of resources, make lots helpful friends, and to spread out far and wide to minimize overall damage. And if your civilization doesn’t have that basic attitude from the beginning, you’re probably not going to advance far enough to worry about the Late Filters anyway. But of course, I am a notorious optimist. And while optimists have more fun along the way, the pessimists sometimes turn out to have been right. As we explore the vast universe, both by traveling to new galaxies and experimenting with new science, we will always face unknowns. We can speculate based on what science we’ve figured out, and we can prepare for disasters that we’re capable of imagining—but until we actually cross that dark, tranquil-looking ocean, until we actually initiate that bold new scientific experiment, we can never truly know what balance we’ve disturbed, what veil we’ve pierced, whose attention we’ve attracted, or what existential threats we’ve unleashed. We’ll ponder that darker view of the Universe next week in Gods & Monsters: Space as Lovecraft Envisioned it, our topic Poll Winner from a couple months back. Lovecraft tends to be viewed as a horror writer more often than a science fiction writer, but the two genres are often mixed together and another author who frequently combined them is Richard Matheson, perhaps best known for his 1954 novel I Am Legend, our Audible Book of the Month. It’s been adapted into film a few times and is often considered the biggest influence on the Zombie Apocalypse genre, though amusingly has no zombies in it. In a period where most apocalyptic literature in science fiction revolved around atomic weapons, robots, and other fictional high-tech devices of physical destruction, Matheson paints us an end of the world that is far more biological, evolutionary, and psychological. The protagonist, Robert Neville, is a very human character who unlike those in many horror stories actually acts with pragmatism and common sense to what seems like the end of humanity, and while the story also features no robots in it, it’s what made me realize that machine rebellions were generally not good Fermi Paradox solutions. You can get a free copy of I am Legend at Audible.com/Isaac or text Isaac to 500-500. Audible offers a 30 day free trial, but each month you’re a member you now get a free audiobook and 2 audible originals, and those credits rollover to the next month or year and stay yours, along with any books you got, even if you later discontinue your membership. And with their convenient app, you can listen on any of your devices and seamlessly pick up where you left off, whether you’re listening at home, commuting, running errands or off jogging or at the gym. Audible makes it cheap and easy to access a vast collection of amazing stories on any device. As mentioned, next week we’ll be dipping into the sci-fi horror genre ourselves, as we explore H.P. Lovecraft’s view of the Universe, our most recent poll winning topic, and thanks again to the thousand of viewers that voted in that poll. The week after that we’ll get a bit lighter and head back to the Alien Civilizations series for “Welcome to the Galactic Community”, to examine some common first contact scenarios where humanity finds itself suddenly aware its surrounded by many vast interstellar empires. For alerts when those and other episodes come out, make sure to subscribe to the channel, and if you’d like to support the channel, you can visit our website to donate, or just share the video with others. Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a great week!
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Channel: Isaac Arthur
Views: 350,726
Rating: 4.864028 out of 5
Keywords: fermi paradox, aliens, SETI, intelligent species, galaxy, civilizaitons, worlds, colonize, interstellar
Id: cCzpYxedIe0
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 34min 53sec (2093 seconds)
Published: Thu Nov 21 2019
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