The flaw in our approach to the Fermi paradox is that we are looking for intelligent life which resembles us as we are now. Big, corporal bodies made of proteins communicating with big, inefficient, slow frequency vibrations. But this is just a transitory phase in our evolution which will pass in the astronomical blink of an eye.
Consider if you agree with these propositions:
- Consciousness is an emergent property of computation
- Computation is possible in any media
- Computation is more efficient in smaller, less massy media
- We are already beginning to fiddle with our own brains and this will accelerate
- Our bodies in general have huge room for optimization and eventually will be completely unrecognizable or even unnecessary as we currently imagine them
- Progress is exponential as our population grows in education, size and free time
If these are true, what does that mean for our destiny as a species in 100k years? 1M years?
I think we can all agree we will become cyborgs, but I think we still imagine our bodies having the same form factor. But that's the flawed assumption. Really we will shrink down. And what's the limit to how far down we shrink and how efficient and massless our bodies/brains get? How would we even be communicating in 1M years? Through entangled qubits? Vibrations in subspace? Who knows, but it's probably not something 21st century earth would even notice with a radio telescope.
So the answer to the Fermi paradox isn't that intelligent life snuffs itself out after a few million years. That's terribly unimaginative. The answer is that from our perspective intelligent civilizations disappear because they change themselves so radically that they transcend our concept of what to look for.
Consider if you agree with these propositions:
- Consciousness is an emergent property of computation
- Computation is possible in any media
- Computation is more efficient in smaller, less massy media
- We are already beginning to fiddle with our own brains and this will accelerate
- Our bodies in general have huge room for optimization and eventually will be completely unrecognizable or even unnecessary as we currently imagine them
- Progress is exponential as our population grows in education, size and free time
If these are true, what does that mean for our destiny as a species in 100k years? 1M years?
I think we can all agree we will become cyborgs, but I think we still imagine our bodies having the same form factor. But that's the flawed assumption. Really we will shrink down. And what's the limit to how far down we shrink and how efficient and massless our bodies/brains get? How would we even be communicating in 1M years? Through entangled qubits? Vibrations in subspace? Who knows, but it's probably not something 21st century earth would even notice with a radio telescope.
So the answer to the Fermi paradox isn't that intelligent life snuffs itself out after a few million years. That's terribly unimaginative. The answer is that from our perspective intelligent civilizations disappear because they change themselves so radically that they transcend our concept of what to look for.