Finally found it... Didnt remember it was a pdf.
Nick Bostrom webpage: http://www.nickbostrom.com/
Here's the beginning:
- But I hope that our Mars probes will discover nothing. It would be good news if we find
Mars to be completely sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit.
Conversely, if we discovered traces of some simple extinct life form—some bacteria,
some algae—it would be bad news. If we found fossils of something more advanced,
perhaps something looking like the remnants of a trilobite or even the skeleton of a smal
mammal, it would be very bad news. The more complex the life we found, the more
depressing the news of its existence would be. Scientifically interesting, certainly, but a
bad omen for the future of the human race.
Great read if, like me, you're obsessed with the Fermi Paradox.
A TL;DR would be like:
-So many planets: Aliens should already been seen, or talk to us. -They did not. So Technological advanced life is rare -If life is abundant (like if we find some on Mars) there must be a "Great Filter" (plague, gamma ray, self destruction, whatever, etc). -This Filter should kill life before it become a galactic civilization. -That's the only explanation for us not seeing any aliens out there. - The only other explanation is : Life is ultra rare. Or the Filter happen early on. -Conclusion: The more advanced are life found on Mars the latter the Filler may occur. -So our Filter still wait for us, and we're doomed.
(A lot of step are subject to discussion. But the pdf is far more clear and explanatory than I could be.)
Written as if he'd just heard of the Fermi Paradox last week. His thinking, broken down to basics, goes like this: IF - life evolves easily THEN - obviously every form of life should colonize the stars and start screaming out onto the hydrogen band looking for friends THEREFORE - the fact that we haven't heard from anyone is proof positive we're alone and if we're alone, it's because either we survived a giant cataclysm that wiped everyone else out OR a great cataclysm is waiting to wipe us out ANY DAY NOW. Yeah, he's got three footnotes but that doesn't make this piece anything but over-reaching sophistry. Stephen Webb listed no less than FIFTY solutions to the Fermi Paradox that do not involve an empty universe: http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Aliens-Everybody-Solutions-Ex... A few off the top of my head: 1) SETI research tends to focus on the assumption that other civilizations are leaking their communication out into the universe the way we do. Except we don't really any more. And haven't since the early 80s. So really, we're looking for a signature of communication that we ourselves only used for about 60 years. 2) In a universe of unlimited resources the only new thing under the sun is culture and culture is less valuable when it has been contaminated by existing culture, therefore the only benefit humanity has to offer the universe is our culture once it's matured and that hasn't happened yet 3) Physicality may very well be a temporary condition of civilization and once a civilization disappears into the singularity why would they bother attempting to communicate with unenlightened bags of blood? Just as an aside, intensity of energy radiated diminishes with distance at the cube. That's why we've been using tight beam and cable communication since Marconi. Yeah, you can put up an antenna and pick up KROK from ten miles away, but the same antenna needs to be ten times as sensitive twenty miles away and a hundred times as sensitive thirty miles away. And considering in space we're more worried about "parsecs" than "miles", it doesn't take long to calculate that any SETI project involves presuming that an alien civilization is expending Apollo Program-grade resources pointing a collimated energy beam directly at us with the explicit intent of saying "hello" across the gap. And when you look at it that way, the answer to "why aren't we hearing them" becomes "because space is really, really, REALLY damn empty." One more note: both the Fermi Paradox and the Drake Equation were created for one reason: we have absolutely no idea how to calculate the magnitude of this problem. The Fermi Paradox was Enrico Fermi illustrating that we don't even know enough about the problem to ask intelligent questions, and the Drake Equation was Frank Drake rebutting by the seat of his pants that intelligent life is so inevitable that even with everything completely unknown it's still worth looking for... PURELY to book time on a new telescope. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#History Nick Bostrom may know a crapload about "humanity" but I for one am not convinced he even cares to learn about "non-humanity."
I agree that Bostrom is putting a lot of weight into a very narrow perspective. Something like this seems not only plausible, but extremely likely, IMO. Immortality is probably not going to be based in biology, and just a few hundred years of immortality probably changes the nature of the 'beings' in ways that we cannot begin to comprehend. I simply do not see us looking or living like we do 500 years from now, and 600 years of history is not even a moment in the cosmic timescale. SETI, although noble, is looking for something that would have had to been created for our benefit, which targets an extremely brief and arbitrary moment of our technological evolution. IMO Bostrom's hypothesis suffers from a human-centric, present-centric, bias.3) Physicality may very well be a temporary condition of civilization and once a civilization disappears into the singularity why would they bother attempting to communicate with unenlightened bags of blood?
Jeron Lanier had more than a few things to say about the Singularity. One point he had that I happen to agree with is that liberal atheists cling to it the way conservative Christians cling to the Rapture. That said, the society we live in today is virtually unrecognizable to the society we lived in back in the 50s. Yeah, there are similarities, but we've come a long way, baby.
It seems a pretty big leap in logic to say that if there's advanced civilizations out there that would have flooded the universe with space craft and colonies. I think he's not really grokking the mind-boggling size of the universe. It is a fun argument, though. I think if there is a Great Filter, then it is ahead of us. Life is common. We as a race are doomed. The universe will not even shrug and other civilizations and races and forms of life will rise and fall. It's all good. We will eat and sleep and make love and enjoy ourselves... and then die. I don't find this pessimistic. I find it glorious! OR -- civilization advances to the point that everyone can upload themselves into a digital existence that is far better than reality. No one would want to expend resources to travel to other planets because you can exist in a magic world of unlimited possibilities for a fraction of the cost. We may well be on the edge of that now.
It seems to me that his hypothesis is comforting, not ominous (and possibly ridiculous, but that's separate). The fact that we've never found any sort of life at all (albeit within a limited range) means that if there is a so-called Filter, it factors into the equation of life very, very early on. Considering that life in some form or another on Earth is billions of years old, I think the odds are with us.
Thank you for posting. I am not very familiar with the Fermi Paradox, but I enjoyed the read. I had not yet been introduced to the Great Filter as a concept. Most people will not think this far ahead (or behind) when measuring the implications of extraterrestrial life. If it exists, it will nice to begin to further unravel our origins and our potential destinations as members of the cosmos. I'm very excited for the announcement and after all of this hoopla, I'll be quite disappointed if the discovery is something benign.