Nick Bostrom: “Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing.”

Transhumanist philosopher (and IEET Chair) Nick Bostrom desperately hopes that we never find signs of extraterrestrial life—advanced or otherwise.  Why? Because he understands the Fermi Paradox.

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Posted by Sam Cook  on  05/03  at  10:18 AM

seems worryingly like Alistair reynold's "inhibitors". Then again an equally probably arguement may be that any life form that becomes truely space faring will only leave minimal evidence of its existance: perhaps some galactic law on the non-interference with sub interstellar civilisations?

It is also entirely possible that the sorts of signals we are looking for are no longer out there; for example we may argue that any advanced civilisation will use electromagnetic signaling in some form but it is equally likely that they will progress past this to more advanced methods such as quantum entanglement or some other wierd and as yet unknown system.

As to the great filter i think that the major one for all civilisations is - why? It may be that most civilisations can travel between stars they just dont either it costs too much - takes too long or they have become so emersed in their own virtual realities that it holds no interest for them.

Posted by Rob Dekker  on  05/05  at  06:12 PM

Thank you for a interesting article !

I like your introduction of the Great Filter but I do not share your conclusion that finding life on Mars (or elsewhere) would in any way change our prospects of our own future. Like Niels Bohr once said "Predictions are hard to make, especially when pertaining to the future".

We do not know where the bottlenecks are were in the Great Filter in the past, and we know virtually nothing about the filter in the future.

But if the current view of the evolution of life on Earth is any indication, and the timing of the various evolutionary steps, the
we can speculate at least with some knowledge.

First off, let me note that it is surprising how quickly life originated on planet Earth. Single cell organisms like cyanobacteria filled the oceans almost as soon as these formed from the cooling planet. These microorganisms were already pretty complex : they contain simple forms of chlorophyl that engage in photosynthesis. Talking about making progress !

This early rise of life should be a strong indication that either it is very easy to create life from anorganic sources, or (more likely in my opinion) hardy microorganisms are abundant in the galaxy, traveling with comets and/or by themselves, seeding life wherever there is water. A concept called "panspermia"

Another indication that primitive microbal originated long ago in the galaxy is that the second step took a long time :
It took 2-3 billion years to get to from single-cell to multi-cell organisms. If life originated on Earth very quickly, why did it take so long for it to get to the next level. Apparently, the step to multi-cell organisms is a very narrow bottleneck in the Great Filter. If it had taken another 2 billion years, we would not have been here (yet).

Second, it seems that after that complexity problem was solved, life exploded in diversity, but apparently it took the remainer of
time to develop intelligence for tool-making and eventually a technological civilisation. Why did tool-making and technological
intelligence not develop earlier, say during the 200 million years that the dinosaurs ruled ? If even one of the sub-species of
dinosaurs would have been smarter than the others, it could have made tools, eradicate it's predators, and build a technological civilisation.. Why did that not happen ? Maybe the step from complex life to (tool-making) intelligence is again one with very low probability. Maybe that is because intelligence (or a big brain) is not so 'smart' for most species' survival ?

So then here we are. Survivers of the Great Filter of the past. We do not know how many others there were (or are) in the Galaxy
that got to the point where we are. But what we DO know is that we are not even close to expanding through the Galaxy. Technological civilisation in progress for a bit over 150 years. 150 years out of 4.5 billion years, and we already face the first major problems : depleting fossil fuels, overpopulation, cimate change etc etc. If the past 150 years is any indication, I see no reason why we would ever make it to become a true interstellar space-faring civilisation. Unless we find dirt-cheap super-fast interstellar spacecraft technology very quickly and expand through the galaxy fairly soon, we would need to find a way to live in 'harmony' with planet. Stabilize our population and recycle all resources. Else we will run out of something very quickly. If we do, then the ones that depend on these resources the most will be the ones parishing.

The point that I am making is that technological civilisation is not necessarily a 'smart' thing for the survival of the species. It might be good for a while, but when the resources run out, or wars break out over resources, then we cannot invest in the 'progress'
path to interstellar colonisation. And the winner of the wars might not be the smartest one. It might simply be the strongest of our
own species. If that happens, there does not need to be a 'cataclismic' event, we could simply slowly parish, and use less
technology along the way. It's survival of the fittest. Not survival of the smartest that rules evolution. You cannot eat a computer, so to say.

Even if we manage to stabilize our existence on Earth, and start with space colonisation of our own solar system, and even venture out to colonize other solar systems, there is still no guarantee that we will colonize the Galaxy. Unless there is something as 'warp drive', Colonists will be pretty much on their own in their new solar system. So they each will again face the same challenges that we face here today : Expand too fast, and you will deplete your resources and perish before you can move on. Expand too slow and colonisation stops because of flukes of Nature that will set-back civilisations to the point that they will parish.

Here is the bottomline : If colonists don't multiply then there is no expansion through the Galaxy. If they do multiply too fast
then they deplete their resources, endangering their civilisation. If they multiply just right, then their may be a window of
opportunity for interstellar expansion, but we do not know how big this window is or can be.

If the probability of successfull interstellar expansion (the window) is lower than the multiplication factor for a successful
expansion, then the colonisation effort will cease after a few successfull 'hops'.

To succesfully colonize the Galaxy, any civilisation (and it's subsequent species) need consistently executing the correct expansion rate over millions of hubs and millions of years.
That effort is not done before, or we would have noticed it very clearly. There would be massive astro projects in the Galaxy like
Dyson-sphers blocking most starlight from most stars, and surely we would have have been not just visited, but there would have been some astro-projects in our own solar system. Why leave such a beautiful star with so many resources alone for crawling creatures on the third planet ?

So, it looks like all ET civilisations (if there) have a limited 'lifetime'. They come and go, some may venture out of their star system, only to decline in numbers a few million years later. If that is true, then there can still be massive amounts of intelligent civilizations out there at this time. We could use SETI and other scientific means to determine upper and lower bounds for this lifetime.

That said, we need to work on facing our own challenges towards our own lifetime as a technology civilisation, if we ever want to fly to the stars...

We have our future in our own hands, and it does not depend on us finding remnants of life on Mars or anywhere else for that matter.

Rob Dekker

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