I wonder how many people will actually attempt mind uploads, or believe that completely computer generated agents are sentient. Especially since it seems like a lot of these technologists are willing to use duck typing to determine sentience, which obviously isn't good enough.
Even a Moravec transfer boils down to taking a leap of faith on the ship of Theseus thought experiment having a definite answer, not to mention the inherent creepiness of the proposition of slowly replacing your brain with some foreign substance.
I think it is entirely impossible for mind transfers to work differently from this*. I think most people who believe in this sort of technology accept this.
In fact, if you do not believe in transcendental souls of some kind, there should be no fear of this type of scenario. You anyway go to sleep each night and awaken after a discontinuity. Why would this be significantly different? Now, killing yourself after having your mind copied to the machine doesn't make any sense.
More interestingly though, if we had the necessary technology for this type of transfer, we should also be able to do mind/machine interfaces, such that either copy of you could directly experience what the other does, meaning that this could be experienced differently from a notion of either a single entity OR 2 separate entities. Of course, it would follow that in fact multiple people could share experiences in similar ways, with unclear effects on the very notion of identity.
If I could see, feel, hear, even think the same things as you, would the concept of me and you as separate identities actually mean anything to us anymore? I suspect that we can't really imagine what society and humanity would actually look like if/when such technology were widely available.
> would the concept of me and you as separate identities actually mean anything to us anymore?
Clearly yes. If your body is destroyed, I will stop experiencing your thoughts and your senses, and vice versa.
> You anyway go to sleep each night and awaken after a discontinuity. Why would this be significantly different?
I'm more interested in why it would be the same. As it stands, there is no account of what is the thing that persists through deep sleep, or more broadly, of why there is sentience to begin with. I'm perfectly ok with conjecturing that sentience is not physical, given that we can't observe it, like we can with the physical. And I don't expect we will find some physics redefining discovery in the brain that will allow us to see us. Some philosophers hold that the more interesting question is why do neuroscientific accounts of the brain seem insufficient to us, but at that point the jig's up, you're doing philosophy and not science. Which is the problem of mind uploading, there's no scientific surety to it, believing in it will be conditional on not thinking too much about it, or on taking the position that "the philosophy is settled!".
> Clearly yes. If your body is destroyed, I will stop experiencing your thoughts and your senses, and vice versa.
Well, assuming a copy of my mind was being perfectly executed by some machine, that would mean that even if my body is destroyed, along with the sensations and thoughts coming from the copy of my brain residing in my body, the machine copy will still continue to feel perceptions (through machine sensors or through your body) and think my thoughts. This would be roughly similar to losing a hand or an eye today - it is a loss, but it does not fundamentally affect your sense of you.
> As it stands, there is no account of what is the thing that persists through deep sleep, or more broadly, of why there is sentience to begin with.
Physics in general has no notion of anything persisting - as far as all our physics is concerned, there are just instants of time (and space) that influence each other (from past to future) but are otherwise separate. The same is true of course in space - there is no physical account for "an object". At the macroscopic level every "object" can be equivalently modeled by smaller pieces held together by various forces. At the quantum level, elementary particles are indivisible, but also indistinguishable: there is no distinction between saying "this electron moved from atom 1 to atom 2" and "the electron in atom 1 disappeared and a new electron appeared in atom 2".
Of course, this may mean that our account of nature is missing something much more basic than consciousness (persistence / the flow of time). Or, it may mean that identity is a fundamentally meaningless notion, an unnecessary (in the logical sense) heurisitc that evolution has bred into us because it is useful for predicting the behavior of the macro world.
Many of us are hoping for a deus ex machina. Some magnificent piece of tech (fusion e.g) that keeps giving us time of plenty indefinitely, allowing us to postpone growing up forever. Because that is what we do, when we get it.
Instead what we got, was the ability to self-surveil us (cellphone-panopticon), to entertain us without consuming to much resources (games, stream-movies, electronic communication-social sphere) and other funny mechanical limbs. We got the ability to practice birth control and we are currently working to get a hold of the worser angels of our nature, left, right and center.
"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes - you get what you need..."
My only worry is that whoever is social engineering this "golden path" has not factored in the tendency to get stuck in feudalistic local optima happily ever after.
But im toasting them. This all could be so much worser..
The essential question is about extrapolating the arc of human progress: If it continues asymptotically, we become as gods "soon"; if it turns into an S trapped by an upper bound, progress grinds slowly to a halt; and if it inverts like a wave, we see a levelling off, equally rapid decline, and maybe some kind of evolutionary rebound rather than simple extinction.
All seem mathematically valid (in the broadest sense) but I don't see a reason to dismiss other options in favor of the asymptotic outcome. But like many people I am intuitively skeptical about we-become-as-gods.
I think progress has already started to hit a local maxima.
An argument I heard was that the number of things recognizable by someone from the past has dropped to almost 0.
Consider, for example, major inventions like airplanes, refrigerators, automobiles, microwaves, telephones.
You take those inventions and people from just 10 years before they became ubiquitous would be completely amazed by them. Most of those inventions took a hold of society from the 1900s -> 1960s. If you look at the 1960s->2020, there are very few stand out inventions that would be completely unrecognizable to the general public. Personal computers and medical treatment options with CRISPER seem to be the only major standouts.
From my perspective, we look to be out of the age of invention. Instead, I expect humanity to continue refining and perfecting already existing tools. That's roughly the same state we were in from the 1600s to the 1800s.
I think a lot has happened between 1960 and 2020:
smartphones, internet, machine learning, hubble telescope, internet of things, ecommerce ...
Going from personal computer of the 1960s to what we have today in our pocket is an enormous achievement in itself so it's a bit disingenuous to list it off as a single word "personal computer".
If we measure progress by whatever metrics: number of patents, number of scientific publication, ... in fact things are speeding up even more.
Most of those things are just natural evolutions of existing technologies. None of those things (barring the internet) are things which scifi from the 1950's didn't predict.
My point is that we don't have those mind blowing inventions that were hard to predict or see coming. Smartphones are the natural evolution of computer chips. Machine learning was already an active discipline in the 60's. In the 60s they were already seeing computing power increase at very fast rates. Internet things is, again, just an extension of general communication. And ecommerce is a real natural extension of the internet.
Compare that to a refrigerator. Before the refrigerator there was an entire industry of ice distribution. It was not a natural extension of really anything.
Same for the microwave. You MIGHT be able to argue that it was somewhat the natural extension of radio, just finally recognized but that's a stretch to think anyone would leap from radio waves to microwave ovens.
As for patent numbers and scientific publications, that doesn't really seem to indicate actual innovation. Rather, it points to population growth and more participation in those programs. Patents, in particular, are issued more out of defense than actual innovation.
What we aren't seeing is massively disruptive technologies. We've not see the power generation which makes fossil fuels obsolete. We aren't seeing the breakthrough in rockets that allow for space vacations. We aren't seeing flying cars. Instead, we are seeing cars getting gradually more efficient, batteries getting gradually better, and computing power getting gradually better.
Actual, honest to goodness, life changing innovation has just stopped.
That's not really all bad, but it does point to "we probably won't be like the gods" any time soon. Just like life got better in the new world from the 1600s to the 1800s (for the most part), I expect life to get better from here on out, but not so mindbogglingly better that 100 years from now it will be completely different from what we experience today. The only major difference in life in 100 years is going to the the impacts of climate change.
The chances that we're about to hit the inflection point in #2 and #3 are still very small. There's a huge area where we can be on the rise in #2 and #3 before inflection.
The author's basic arguments in this post are not at all about space expansion, they are simply about how "wild" (that is, unlikely or surprising) any of the options actually are. They present a timeline where they don't believe it's that significant if the predictions they will make will happen in 100 or 100k years, since they intend to claim that this will create a civilization stable for billions of years.
I would bet that the whole series will end up being mostly meaningless, in the sense that it will be either trivial or wrong. That is, either it will continue to make trivial observations (either we live in the first ~100k years of a billion-year civilization, or such a civilization will never exist - a truism); or, they will start making obviously wrong claims, such as the AI singularity idea.
Edit: In general, talking about stability on the order of billions of years is absurd. This is literally enough time to conceive of self-conscious organisms evolving inside our bodies. It is enough times for the radioactive decay of many stable materials. Imagining that a man-made structure could be stable for this amount of time is laughable.
"Actually, no, let's go even more conservative. You think our economic and scientific progress will stagnate. Today's civilizations will crumble, and many more civilizations will fall and rise. Sure, we'll eventually get the ability to expand throughout the galaxy. But it will take 100,000 years. That's 10x the amount of time that has passed since human civilization began in the Levant."
How far will these civilizations crumble? What will they use for energy, given that we have exhausted the easily accessible sources of coal and oil?
"Spreading throughout the galaxy would certainly be harder if nothing like mind uploading (which I'll discuss in a future piece, and which is part of why I think future space settlements could have "value lock-in" as discussed above) can ever be done."
"Mind uploading" is the wrong way to look at it. How about "mind copying" for a best case (whether that copying requires the destruction of the original is another issue); "mind simulation" is a less palatable case.
"But space expansion seems feasible, and our galaxy is empty. These two things seem in tension. A similar tension - the question of why we see no signs of extraterrestrials, despite the galaxy having so many possible stars they could emerge from - is often discussed under the heading of the Fermi Paradox."
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. (Yeah, that's pretty lame.)
> What will they use for energy, given that we have exhausted the easily accessible sources of coal and oil?
That’s a source of much depression for me. We’re so close to being ready to fill the galaxy, while simultaneously close to a collapse that might prevent any future civilization from doing the same.
And what if we really are the only hope in the galaxy, or even beyond that, to propagate life that can truly appreciate the universe?
You can bootstrap without fossil fuels. It’s tough to rely on biomass with ~8 billion people, but if the population is smaller, it works fine. Also, we used to rely on hydroelectric produced hydrogen for nitrogen fertilizer for decades before steam reforming of fossil fuels became cheaper and proven (around 1950). Trains ran on biomass in much of the US. Early European American settlers used biomass and bio-sourced iron (bog iron made of deposits from iron bacteria) for iron implements. We used a lot of hydro for industrial prime motive power, too, in the 1800s in the US, for grinding grains, etc, etc. before that, the Netherlands and others harnessed wind for industrial purposes. Wind, hydro, and biomass is enough to kickstart a hydrogen economy and bootstrap into solar, modern wind, modern batteries, nuclear, etc. Fossil fuels are just a convenient shortcut and not always as useful as they seem (see: the Resource Curse, how resource-poor Japan is still able to industrialize, etc). If the Fracking Revolution hadn’t happened, the US would still be burning a lot more coal, but we’d probably have more electrification of transport, etc.
So I think if humanity used up every scrap of fossil fuel, we’d still be able to bootstrap to industrialization and modernity. But using up all fossil fuels is actually pretty hard (which is why climate change is hard to mitigate…). There’s hundreds of years of gas and oil, probably a thousand years of coal, etc. Biomass can be used up over a faster time, but if you modulate its harvesting, it can last indefinitely and even when you scour the landscape of trees and desertify the landscape, over tens of thousands of years, nature will reverse what you did (minus extinct species).
What I think is missing here is the ROI on each Joule. Coal accessible from the surface is effectively free, as are oil seeps. It's certainly possible to bootstrap absent fossil fuels, it takes a lot more work to generate them, thus generating less net civilizational surplus. Since the natural tendency is to use surplus is to improve quality of life, it requires a tremendous amount of concentrated surplus to be able to invest in something very expensive with a very long timeline for return on investment like space settlement.
In other words, absent tons of "free" resources like fossil fuels, it will require a larger percentage of available civilizational surplus to be dedicated to space than it would today. That implies either strong wealth inequality (more than today), authoritarian central government with high taxes, or a unified population interested in long term investments. The first two seem more likely than the latter.
I honestly don’t think it’s that bad. Wood has a pretty big ROI. It’s not even underground, you just chop it down. But it’s also not hard to accidentally cut down all your trees on your island or whatever. As long as you can maintain some fairly sustainable fuel harvesting practices, trees can provide cheap and high energy ROI, enough to bootstrap hydro and wind from which hydrogen can be made and any manner of modern energy (although nuclear and solar and batteries are even more efficient). Biomass can serve as a feedstock for chemicals via steam reforming to syngas and then Fischer-Tropsch to anything else, and biomass is abundant enough for that non-energy purpose even with 8 billion people as long as your prime energy comes elsewhere.
Gotta realize that the fossil fuel energy surplus is often highly wasted on authoritarian regimes and such. Industrious nations can & do find other sources of energy, and there are many to choose from (hydro, wind, biomass, geothermal, nuclear fission, tidal, photovoltaic, solar thermal, ocean temperature gradient, even space based solar, nuclear fusion, etc).
Simply wind energy and hydrogen electrolysis would work. Both are relatively simple.
I think we have a kind of fatalism when it comes to energy sources which isn’t helped by the fact that advocates of one energy source often invest a lot of time in downplaying other energy sources, but we actually have a LOT of good, economic-surplus-compatible options to choose from, and fossil fuels are just one.
The real key is knowledge and precision. From that, and nearly any mix of energy sources and raw materials, comes abundance.
Not true. In the early American colonies, the colonists used charcoal and bog iron to supply local blacksmiths. The Iron Age in particular enabled widespread metal use precisely because sources of iron ore and charcoal are very broadly distributed geographically. Ironically (heh), it was the Bronze Age which relied more heavily on trade as you needed both copper and tin (which was especially rare geographically) to make bronze, which meant you had to have fairly vast trading networks. The development of iron smelting was a pretty important invention that vastly simplified and diversified availability of weapons-quality metal.
(Although to make hardenable steel—probably essential for industrialization—is harder than mere iron and requires better process control… but charcoal can still be the fuel source. And it was, for ancient steelmaking.)
EDIT: in fact, even in the first Industrial Revolution, water power was more important economically for motive power in Britain than coal driven steam power. Globally, coal didn’t start to exceed traditional biomass for prime energy until around 1900.
> "Mind uploading" is the wrong way to look at it. How about "mind copying" for a best case (whether that copying requires the destruction of the original is another issue); "mind simulation" is a less palatable case.
One way we could do it, it's to slowly replace one by one natural neuron by a virtual or synthetic one and by keeping all synapse correctly connected. It should allow an "upload" (well more a conversion) without breaking consciousness continuity.
Some depressing reasons why I can't get excited about this:
1) Speed of light, that inconvenient fact. Somehow in sci-fi stories, that's supposedly "overcome" someday? What if it never is?
2) Intelligent life on Earth is indeed "unlikely" given all the things that could have extinguished it by now. However, given billions of galaxies, it must have existed in many, many places, maybe even in our own galaxy, and some of them are maybe even still around.
3) Given (1), they will never contact us, nor will we contact them.
4) Even if you don't accept (1) through (3), what could anyone usefully do about it?
The speed of light isn't as much of a bummer as our inability to approach it. According to Wikipedia, there are at least 10 terrestrial exoplanets in the habitable zone, within 40 light years of Earth. Thanks to time dilation, if we could figure out how to travel there at say 95% of the speed of light, it would only take about 15 years or so from the traveler's point of view to get there. You don't even need a sci-fi "generation" ship. You could send a team of healthy 20-30 year olds, and those same people could start colonizing well before old age hits. If you could achieve 99% the speed of light, you could go 3X that distance comfortably within the travelers' healthy age range. Hell, if we could go 99.999999% of c, a traveler could visit anywhere in the galaxy, only aging 15 years.
> 2) Intelligent life on Earth is indeed "unlikely" given all the things that could have extinguished it by now. However, given billions of galaxies, it must have existed in many, many places, maybe even in our own galaxy, and some of them are maybe even still around.
"Must" is an extremely strong word to use for something with entirely unknown probability. There is absolutely no basis to calculate a probability of life existing at all (except to say that it is >0, since we exist), and intelligence is many more steps above that.
The full extent of what we can say with any kind of certainty at all about intelligent life is that the probability of it existing outside Earth is non-0. Basically anything else is wild speculation.
I'll also add that discussing time across the entire universe is meaningless, as we know from special relativity. An event in another galaxy that is outside our light hyper-cone has no time-like relation to our own history. A civilization in a galaxy that's 1M light years away from us can be seen as concurrent with us by some observers, can be seen as existing in our distant past by other observers (up to 1M years ago), or in our distant future by yet others (up to 1M years in our future).
Even if intelligent life existed in a nearby galaxy, our civilization might be gone by the time a communication manages to go round trip. More realistically, what are the odds that civilizations in the universe occur near to each other in both space AND time? ie, perhaps an ancient civilization 1,000 light years away came and went 20,000 years ago? Or longer? There's no chance we'd sync up.
>Somehow in sci-fi stories, that's supposedly "overcome" someday
It's always overcome in stories about humans, conducted at biological timescales.
There are many ways to construct a functional interstellar civilization that just aren't very interesting to read about, much like how nearly all people living today have lives that wouldn't make a good novel.
Nonsentient mesoscale replicators riding solar sails that take thousands of years of years to visit stars would be cheap, reliable, scalable, and fantastically boring as the subject of a fiction novel; given the lack of any human characters or human conflict.
I think this article misses the possibly that we had a shot to get an interplanetary civilization due to the accumulation of fossil fuels over the last ~400m years, but that we've consumed those resources not getting out into space meaningfully and therefore have missed the window (as it were). We've clearly exceeded the carrying capacity of Earth and the period from the 1950s to the 2050s may well be the only time period where there is enough civilizational/energy surplus to afford the extremely high upfront costs of creating self sustaining ecologies off of Earth. I hope I'm wrong, but if civilization collapses (as they all seem to do eventually), I'm not sure it will ever be possible for another Earth based species to get off planet meaningfully (due, for example, to the unique circumstances required to lay down large coal beds).
> We've clearly exceeded the carrying capacity of Earth
I’m curious to hear what leads you to this idea. Global warming is really the only major threat (well, covid too) our entire species faces but that is just a cultural/political issue and is largely technologically solved. All other issues that would stop our species from expanding are solved to a large degree (at a level where they don’t threaten our species growth).
The collapse of fisheries worldwide, soil degradation across nearly all arable land currently in use, broad ecosystem collapse (see decreasing numbers of insects worldwide). All of these are signs of unsustainable use of the planet's resources. Hell, absent fertilizers from fossil fuels, the green revolution (and subsequent population boom) wouldn't be possible.
There are too many people living living lives that consume too many resources currently. While we've slowed our growth, we're going to shrink our resource utilization absent extra capacity from space. That reduction will either be managed or unmanaged reduction (e.g. collapse).
All of those aren’t going to make humans extinct though. Are we potentially ruining the earth? Yeah probably. But the human race could certainly survive long term with no soil and no ocean animals.
Soil degradation, ocean acidification, basic resource scarcity (running out of copper or phosphates for example)
Others which come to mind that are "fixable" through technology vs psycho-cultural features:
Overfishing - > global enforceable legislation of the seas
Meat consumption - > high quality meat analogs
Plastics endocrine disruption - > improved discovery of protein folding to discover problematic endocrine disruptors
Batteries - > novel types of battery chemistry
Lack of Water - > drip irrigation, desalination (desertification itself can't be per se fixed)
Lack of Energy longterm - > SPARK, ARC nuclear type reactors
Even soil degradation could be tackled with GMO crops and improved nitrates/phosphates, it would not be ideal because these also generate toxic algae blooms on river deltas but "would make do". Ocean acidification is the scary one just like most other effects related to global warming
Disagree, you get to space using fossils and then what? Can't ship everything from Earth, the surplus is not that big, you need local industry first. I suspect even hundreds of starships won't be enough, our technology is incredibly interdependent. Only then you can build self-sustaining ecology.
Industry needs loads of energy and only practical power sources in space are solar (up to some distance but there water is scarce) and nuclear.
So if there was a missing chance, I'd say it was developing ubiquitous nuclear power. Would help on Earth, would help in space.
I do think that civilization will collapse. We are too optimistic, we don’t see ourselves failing; we have watched too many Hollywood movies and we think we will save ourselves no matter what.
Think for a moment what would happen if we, the whole planet, all decide one Sunday afternoon : it’s enough, it’s fine if the entire human race doesn’t make it 100 years more. Let’s leave the planet to the other species. Thanks for all the fish!
>I do think that civilization will collapse. We are too optimistic, we don’t see ourselves failing; we have watched too many Hollywood movies and we think we will save ourselves no matter what.
I agree. I was already on this line of thinking and watching our collective response to COVID really solidified just how little work we're ever going to do on climate change. We badly misunderstand history as a linear function of progress, so we believe things always get better. We rely too much on the hope of a technological breakthrough that would mean we don't have to do any real work, because we got used to that in the 20th century. Living standards and health outcomes are already worse for this generation compared to the previous generation and we soothe ourselves with cheap consumer goods because they're the only things we can afford. We're not going to leave Earth, we're going to stay here and ruin it out of selfishness.
why would you assume fossil fuels are a requirement for space travel? liquid hydrogen doesn't require fossil fuels to make, it is just a lot cheaper to do it that way.
we could also use nuclear propulsion, which the russians have been able to successfully do with cruise missles
I think OP may be implying the fossil fuels are necessary for the "industrial revolution" part of a civilization's development -- and that industrial revolution is a gating factor for achieving spacefaring technology.
Yes, it's this. After the collapse of the western Roman empire, the standard of living dropped to bronze age levels in many areas, well below where it was before the Romans took over. Assuming a similar decline after modern civilization collapses (to say pre-industrial revolution levels), I don't see how it's possible to get back without the easy surplus energy. It's much more complicated to build batteries or nuclear or solar than it is to make a steam engine.
My interpretation of OP was that if civilization collapses, a revival would require cheap energy (probably fossil fuel) to rebuild industry and science - and that fossil fuel is gone.
There are lots of alternative energy sources, but we haven't managed to switch to them with our pretty advanced science and energy, so there may not be a developmental path for less advanced societies that ends in plentiful energy sources without fossil fuels as a stepping stone.
Put another way: If a society at the level of pre-industrial revolution Europe didn't have access to oil and coal, do you think they could have figured out nuclear energy? How would they obtain the energy to process and refine fissionable material? Or even for that matter... how could they obtain the energy to smelt iron and steal, let alone build computer chips and solar panels.
So our failure now also limits what any successor intelligent species could accomplish (until enough fossil fuels can form again).
I wouldn't say it's a hard assumption, it's just mighty convenient that there was a carboniferous period on this planet that left us with some really easy energy to use for industrialisation.
There's a question then of whether we'd have been stuck on a pre industrial ladder rung if it hadn't happened.
It just seems necessary, but of course the opposite might be true, that if we didn't have this easy energy we'd have jumped ahead with solar and wind or others instead.
I recall speculating years ago that the universe might be starting a phase change from non-living to living matter. Life, left to its own devices, will eventually (after billions and billions more years) transform all matter and energy in the universe into life, causing life to become the dominant physical process for a long epoch of time.
The life we see (and are) now is the very beginning of that phase transition, the seed crystals if you will.
It also leads to my personal speculation about the Fermi paradox: if the universe is relatively uniform and has cooled and evolved at a consistent rate, we might not see any star-faring aliens because there aren't very many of them around yet. All across the universe there could be a ton of worlds with life approximately as complex as is found on this one. I call this the "uniform cooling hypothesis." We don't see things like alien megastructures because that stuff hasn't happened yet.
Of course for the uniform cooling hypothesis to fully explain the Fermi paradox the standard deviation for living complexity/diversity would have to be relatively small. The distribution would have to be tight enough that at least a non-trivial fraction of galaxies do not yet contain any significant number of star-faring aliens. We would therefore have a decent chance of being in one of those not-yet-colonized galaxies, explaining our "paradox."
If the distribution is really tight we might go to the stars and run right into others who are on their first journeys, or get visited within a short time frame +/- our first interstellar trips. If some fraction of UFOs are aliens maybe we are seeing them because we are about to do the same thing. It's "steam engine time."
Note also that intergalactic travel is many orders of magnitude harder than interstellar travel. It would require speeds close to 'c' and accompanying time dilation to even be imaginable, since over such long time scales complex materials actually start to fall apart at the atomic and molecular level. Sleeper ships could go to Centauri but they won't take you to Andromeda. The uniform cooling hypothesis would easily explain a lack of intergalactic colonists. They simply do not exist yet.
However, if you’re happy with this, I guess we could just launch balls of biological matter at different planets and be content that in a few thousand years the balls may land and start the seed of life.
Why colonize the nearest star - we have plenty of space around the Sun and surrounding it is more than enough material to construct countless O'Neill cylinders?
This sort of thinking, which has been enjoyed by many great sci-fi writers over the last ~seventy years, is cool on one hand, and is the sort of thing I enjoyed in high school. But it turns out that the big problems facing us aren't exclusively technological. Renewable energy is an example of a technological problem; greed is an example of a psycho-cultural one. Both are vitally important to address, but sci-fi authors have generally tackled the technical problems and not the cultural ones.
Good article, however I think it's too pessimistic about the possibility of extraterrestrials. I don't know if it's human exceptionalism or poor understanding of how mind-breakingly massive the universe actually is, or a combination of the two, but there is life out there. We've only been searching for a couple decades with our primitive tools and haven't even begun to scratch at an atom of the surface of places to look for life.
> This view seems "wild": we should be doing a double take at any view that we live in such a special time.
The thing about exponential growth is that all points seem "wild" with growth.
Humans or AI traveling in space seems like a smaller leap to me than several previous "advancements" like the origin of life itself or the evolution of multicellular organisms.
So seems like some sort of front loading that the singularity isn't going to happen between the years 2030 to 2040 after all...
But I'm biased to think the Galaxy is already inhabited for the same reasons people think we are living in a simulation. What continues to amaze me is why people think the Earth must be so very very special and that if aliens were out there they would be paying attention to us other than at best monitoring us like a beehive to make sure we don't start stirring up the galactic pot.
As to why they don't just wipe us out, I figure any world with billions of years of evolutionary progress is valuable IP and worth preservation if possible. Or as I joked for a very long time: worlds like ours are the equivalent of reality television for advanced species. And I loved it when South Park covered that very subject.
I don't actually believe technology can save us, don't find the techno-utopias concocted by sci-fi authors to actually be utopias, and don't accept the thesis that we have progressed because we're better at satisfying bodily appetites to be compelling.
> Ultimately, it's very hard for me to see a case against thinking something like this is at least reasonably likely: "We will eventually create robust, stable settlements throughout our galaxy and beyond." It seems like saying "no way" to that statement would itself require "wild" confidence in something about the limits of technology, and/or long-run choices people will make, and/or the inevitability of human extinction, and/or something about aliens or simulations.
Human extinction bit seems pretty probable, not particularly wild. It will be wild if we can stick around long enough to get our technology to the point where it can continue advancing indefinitely without us.
> A key part of my view (which I'll write about more later) is that within this century, we could develop advanced enough AI to start a productivity explosion.
This is the productivity explosion. I hate to break it to you, but it's hard to imagine places where AI isn't being implemented, and while our current research is progressing pretty smoothly on the topic, I don't really see any 10x or 100x improvements in that pipeline, unless we're strictly talking about model training (which can feel like an entirely different discipline altogether).
If the current situation wasn't so grim, I would chuckle at the magnitude of delusional thinking it must take to produce a post such as this, when the climate crisis has humanity paralyzed like deer caught in the headlights.
We're destroying the earth and suffocating in our own waste, yet "there's a good chance of productivity explosion by 2100 which could quickly lead to what one might call a "technologically mature" civilization"
The same magnitude of delusional thinking can be seen in the reactions to your post... Far too many are willing to believe that the climate crisis will be fixed by someone else in the future, and we'll all just forget about it as a minor blip (all the while, being entirely unwilling to accept even the slightest change that could affect economic growth).
Right now climate situation is not scary enough even for activists in the area -- they spend their time mixing in unrelated social justice issues and protesting nuclear plants. Such frivolous notions will fall off once it becomes clear we actually need to solve concrete problems or die trying.
It is possible for destruction to happen just fast enough for everybody to finally take notice, but not fast enough to preclude geoengineering solutions for good. That's one possible (if not pretty) path to get to a technologically mature stage.
The risk is always that we wake up already in a boiling frog state, or that even when dangers become self-evident for everybody, we still spend time on power games instead of fixing the problems. In that case, well, we kinda deserve it...
The climate crisis will probably only wipe poor humans out. I'd also say that it is a rather new phenomenon (the last generation) where people have started worrying about climate change. We are starting to take action. The next generation could already be a lot more sustainable.
Humans will wipe out plenty of animals and species on the way to that extinction though (also clearly plenty of other animals are suffering from climate change, see the estimated billion animals that died in Australian wildfires last year, or the baby birds that jumped to their deaths to escape the heat in the PNW heat dome this year, or the bleaching of coral reefs, or all sorts of other ways the climate is killing off animals).
Sure there might be some life that survives the climate crisis after we're gone, but the planet is going to lose most of its biodiversity before then.
Ever since the earliest hunter-gatherer times, there has never been a crisis of this magnitude in the history of the human race, so I'm not sure what you're on about. Ever since we were more than a handful of people living in a single location, there has never before been a situation where, by our own actions, we were this likely to destroy our current way of life for the entirety of the human population.
>We're destroying the earth and suffocating in our own waste
To be clear: Global warming is bad. It is going to kill tens of millions of people, drown a lot of cities, and render alarmingly large sections of the planet uninhabitable to unmodified humans.
It does not actually pose an existential threat to technological civilization. Even 5C of warming would not kill all humans.
The cities will just move north. We are not in danger of running out of oil or coal before transitioning to clean electricity. 2100 will look very different, (less international trade, almost certainly no unified global internet like we have now) but regular ole global capitalism will keep rolling along.
Humanity is not dealing with global warming very effectively. But it won't kill 100% of all humans. It won't even kill 50%.
> The cities will just move north. We are not in danger of running out of oil or coal before transitioning to clean electricity. 2100 will look very different, (less international trade, almost certainly no unified global internet like we have now) but regular ole global capitalism will keep rolling along.
You're greatly underestimating the societal impact that this will have. Cities don't 'just move' somewhere else in a few decades without causing massive turmoil. For one thing, the countries up north (or south) will not just accept (or be able to handle) a few hundred million immigrants. There will be global war, and it's hard to say what will be left at the end. At the very least, billions will die, not 'tens of millions'.
Not to mention, we have no idea what impact this will have on global agriculture. Like it or not, we are not entirely separated from existing ecosystems, and the destruction of most land-dwelling animals living near the equator will not be a small thing.
Seriously, how are you going to prove mind uploads will somehow be different from this: https://www.whompcomic.com/2013/06/19/pork-futures/
Even a Moravec transfer boils down to taking a leap of faith on the ship of Theseus thought experiment having a definite answer, not to mention the inherent creepiness of the proposition of slowly replacing your brain with some foreign substance.