Type III Societies (Apparently) Do Not Exist
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
There are huge number of assumptions based on that idea. A fundamental one is that a civilization in a relativistic universe would grow to densely inhabit a galaxy. Another is that they would need that much energy. Another is that even if they did have need for that much energy, they'd bother collecting EM radiation from stars.
That third is an interesting one to me. Now, you could muck up the night sky for the entire Milky Way, or you could, with Sufficiently Advanced Technology (tm), annihilate a total of 10 Jupiter-masses a year across the whole galaxy. For your average star system, that's extracting energy from 1.1 billion kg of mass a year, or roughly what NYC's garbage collection services dispose of every two weeks.
Pondering that, I suspect it's the wrong idea to imagine that a very advanced civilization, something we can only understand in the dimmest sense, would be constrained by something as specific as stellar energy emissions.
Even if they needed that much energy, the best way to do that [that we know of] is to build a Dyson sphere. With every star shrouded by a Dyson sphere you no longer need to shroud the galaxy.
A more critical assumption is that a type III civilization even cares about masking its presence. If they were even worried about being attacked, the speed of light would mask their progress for a great deal of time and, because of the distances involved, even seeing them once the light reaches you would be a massive accomplishment - most likely you'd have to search for individual stars in another galaxy which are disappearing in unusual ways.
A type II civilization could possibly build a telescope with a large enough aperture but I assume that type II civilizations would be long past their ignorant warring ways.
Also, a civilization could have dimantled Andromida Galaxy 2 million years ago and can't tell yet. For more distant objects the gap gets rather wide.
It's entirely possible to burn deuterium in small reactors but there's only about 1/2500 as much deuterium as hydrogen.
(Perhaps some unthinkably advanced civilization could figure out how to get energy from hydrogen fusion in a small reactor, but you did specify "our current understanding of physics.")
As to size, on galactic scales all our current fusion designs are tiny. Scale it up to even just 20 miles on a side and proton proton fusion is doable. For a type III civilization capable of destroying starts that's also tiny. Remember your suggesting dysons spheres as the 'reasonable' option.
PS: The proton proton chain also produces deuterium as an intermediary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton%E2%80%93proton_chain_re...
Tons of unknown variables filled-in with vigorous hand waving, ad-hoc and unproven assumptions left and right, etc, and some high school math thrown in for good measure...
Seems to me like a completely rationale thing to measure about the universe. Imagine if the result had come back true?
Ah, I see. It's a play on words. "Apparently" is meant as "is visible", not in the sense of "this is true". Astronomer humor.
But I get what you mean.
... and now we have a sci-fi reason for quasars. :)
I question how stealthy that would really make you, though. If someone was bothering to look for stealthy civilizations, they'd just have to scatter some observatories around their region of the galaxy, then watch. Eventually, your structure would occult a star from the POV of one of those observatories, or they'd pick up your beam scattering in interstellar gasses or dust clouds.
I realize this is all space opera, not hard SF. It's still fun.
"There's nothing here, Captain. Nothing at all. So you're saying that they moved an entire star system? In the last solar cycle?"
Good times, good times.
That is, maybe there are Type III Kardashev Civilizations and their usage of the energy of their galaxy in fact radiates energy that would be visible to us... except that they've evolved to that point much later that the light we're receiving since it takes millions of years for that light to reach us.
In those millions of years they could very well have reached that technological level, but it will take some more millions of years for that to reach us... by that time mabye that Civilization doesn't exist anymore... Maybe our civilization doesn't exist anymore...
In this case we extract information from the radiation that comes from those galaxies, and the information is too slow to travel such vast distances, since it can't go faster than the speed of light.
In summary, we're looking for ANCIENT Type III civilizations.
Yes. This is because of the low probability that intelligent life develops somewhere else at even close to the same time as it did on Earth.
Our best understanding is that life has existed on Earth for something like 4 billion years, and complex life has existed for about 500 million. However, complex life capable of building spacecraft (or even radios) has only existed for a few hundred thousand (that is being extremely generous, of course), and only developed that technology in the last ~100 years.
If intelligent life has or will evolve somewhere else in the universe, and progresses anything like it did here, then the odds seem overwhelmingly in favour of one of two scenarios:
- It evolved millions of years ago, and if it has not wiped itself out, is virtually god-like by our standards due to its head start on technological development.
- It has not yet evolved, or at best is the equivalent of primates or the proto-humans of several hundred thousand years ago.
We are separated from mice (or at least somewhat similar animals) by approximately 40m years of evolution, I think that the separation to a Galaxy altering level entity would be much more profound, and frankly we wouldn't understand what it was if it came and tickled us.
We are separated from mice by 80million years of evolution -- 40million from the common ancestor, and 40million to the other modern species.
Or simply 40million years of divergent evolution.
For an example, I point to the horseshoe crab. We're separated by x million years of evolution from the horseshoe crab, because at some point there's a common ancestor. Its ancestor evolved to the horseshoe crab, millions of years ago, and then stopped. Meanwhile, our ancestor continued to evolve into us. The horseshoe crab is a prehistoric animal, a "living fossil". It hasn't evolved significantly in millions of years. This is quite different from mice.
Another example is the coelacanth fish; it was thought to be long-extinct as we have prehistoric fossils of it dating to the dinosaur days. Turns out it's still alive. Another less-extreme example is the shark: it's a little different than its prehistoric ancestors, but not much. I'm sure a biologist could point to a bunch of other species that haven't changed significantly since the days of the dinosaurs.
Mammals like mice have indeed been evolving just as long as we have, but many non-mammalian species have not.
I did get the date wrong - I should have said 65my.
Here is a link
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/five-early-prim...
You're probably better off disassembling the suckers and storing their matter in a sensible way, rather than have it sit there, burning. Stars are kind of like trash fires; maybe we should be looking for less energy in a type III civ, not shielding.
Plants on Earth play an incredible optimization game. Water is necessary not just for chemical metabolism, but because throwing it away is an essential part of the internal material transport systems of a plant. Evaporation in the leaves creates a relatively lower osmotic pressure in the higher levels of the plant. Between capillary action and the slight but insistent pull to replace evaporated water in the leaves, plants have a pumping mechanism with essentially nil energy input: minerals and nutrients gathered in the roots just ride on up with the tide.
Stars may be a similar story for efficient fusion. Sure, with sufficiently advanced technology, I can make inordinately denser energy sources with less boil-off. But do I want to? Maybe letting the brute physics of a gravity well do the job simply has unbeatable efficiency -- just like evaporation as one end of a pump for plants on Earth is clearly no comparison to any motorized pump for volume, but for cost-effect, nothing else comes close.
Stars are just so wasteful; all that energy going into convection currents, and you have to build this big damned sphere to capture all the energy. Better to lift the damned thing and, at the very least, make a dwarf star out of the larger ones. Now you're talking trillions of years of burning (it's still a trash fire, but at least it's manageable).
But what if we need/want volumes? The way we can't (or don't want to) use trees/plants for pumping water in time-efficient manner, we may not (want to) use the gravity brute force based stars as energy sources and we may invent more time-efficient fusion reactors.
At least if society is doomed we'll only doom ourselves, and not the entire Milky Way! One takes what cheer one can get when pondering this sort of subject.
If the universe is all the same age and if the emergence and evolution of life is tied to the overall thermodynamic evolution of the universe, then everything might be approximately of the same scale and complexity within a certain standard deviation.
If this is true then when we go out there we will meet all the others who have also just developed to that level.
Of course since we have basically no data, we can't actually argue either way beyond vague hand-wavey speculation. You can't calculate standard deviation from a sample size of one.
That such a synchronization mechanism should work with such precision over the entire universe seems very unlikely. Filtering would not require synchronization, so that seems much more likely.
Here's the speculation in more detail:
Evolution can be viewed as an information transfer mechanism that learns about the universe and transfers that information into the genome. (This is one interpretation found in evolutionary information theory.) As the universe inflates there is more total information in it, and therefore more information for evolution to learn. At certain points, a kind of information density "critical mass" is reached and phase transitions occur: the emergence of life, complex life, cooperative/multicellular life, higher order intelligence, industrialization and complex society, etc. Since the total amount of information in the universe is (we're speculating) tied directly to the arrow of time, this occurs simultaneously everywhere at approximately the same time.
Again this is hypothesis bordering on speculation since we do not know of any mechanism that directly couples information content to cosmic inflation like this, or even how we would go about measuring such a thing objectively. For instance it's not possible to differentiate between random and encrypted data using Shannon information measures, so what statistic would you use?
Furthermore, if it has such a powerful and pervasive effect on evolution, why haven't we already discovered it in our studies of evolution to date? We live on a planet chock full of evolving life.
Abiogenesis has never been observed to occur independently of its presumed occurrence when life started on Earth.
Given the current state of scientific knowledge on this topic, the only certain lower bound on this number is the probability of molecules in a suitable "organic soup" arranging themselves into a self-contained bacterium. And that probability is a _very_ small number.
If f_l is _very_ small, then there is no need to be pessimistic about our own long-term survival. We see no advanced alien civilisations, because there is no other life out there of any kind - the rest of the observable universe is sterile.
f_l may be 0.1 but f_i is almost certainly multiple orders of magnitude smaller.
If we take mind upload as a given, then it should also be possible to create "clones" of our minds with ease. This level of technology will have a profound effect on the value society places on individuality.
"all" is usually the key issue with solutions to the Fermi paradox. We can certainly find reasons for any given civilization to go the other way, but it's more difficult to argue that all of them do.
I would also argue that life itself has proven remarkably long-term stable on our planet. Granted, it has not been stable enough to produce a type-III society, but if we remove homo sapiens from the planet for a thought experiment, there exist other species that are developing communication or tool-use skills and might succeed us even on the technological path.
So my view is that, unless we continue to fail spectacularly, life will still continue without us. Even if we do not reach type-III, that does not necessarily preclude Earth from producing a type-III society in the future.
Sounds like you are the one who has a narrow view of "society," rather. In the abstract, it only need be something like "a multitude of cooperating but competing, independent self-preserving, self-advocating sentient interests." That's fairly abstract while still being a sure recipe for highly non-linear and chaotic effects.
Even if we do not reach type-III, that does not necessarily preclude Earth from producing a type-III society in the future.
But then you're setting up a situation where a series of chaotic and unstable arrangements snuff themselves out or flare-out in a puff of singularity-colored smoke, ending with the appearance of the first stable meta-societal form.
What questions in this field are not open?
1. Advanced societies have probably solved the aging problem, leading to either extremely long lives or effective immortality. As long as these societies keep reproducing (and they will, unless they deliberately engineer out the urge to procreate, which I consider to be unlikely), they'll need space to spread out. Sure, they could probably pack themselves like sardines into a single solar system, but that only works if they'll be spending 100% of their time in virtual reality, and that would be begging the question.
2. A need for resources. Type III societies can capture 100% of the output of a star, but even this amount of energy might not suffice once society grows large enough. And even at that level it's still probably easier to manipulate matter than it is to convert energy into matter, so it'll be more efficient to harvest planets and asteroids and whatnot for raw building materials, which means leaving the solar system.
3. Even assuming they manage to create virtual reality that is 100% indistinguishable from reality, it's likely that there will still be a lot of beings that will reject the idea of living 100% in virtual reality simply because it's virtual. Even if it's indistinguishable from reality, they'll still know it's not real. So they may visit VR, but will want to actually live in the real world. Or in other words, humans have shown a tendency towards the perverse, and it's not unreasonable to assume aliens will too.
4. Any kind of scientific research still being done at that level will likely require the use of reality instead of VR. VR is a simulation, and even if it's indistinguishable from reality to your senses, it's still presumably not actually simulating reality down to the planck level (because it's part of the universe, it cannot simulate the entire universe at the same fidelity that the universe itself operates at, as that would presumably require more information than the universe contains), and so there's probably a fair amount of research at that level that simply can't work in simulation and requires testing against actual reality.
If they had as little agency around the issue of population control as you suggest, this makes me question their status as "advanced."
Beyond that, if you have effectively infinite space and resources, there's no need at all to have even the slightest bit of population control. Population control is only necessary to ensure adequate resources (including space to live) for everybody. But when there's no constraint on resources, there's no reason why anybody shouldn't have as many children as they desire.
So you suggested that their civilization as a whole had little agency around population control.
Beyond that, if you have effectively infinite space and resources, there's no need at all to have even the slightest bit of population control.
You're forgetting simple geometry. Space empires can only expand proportional to n^3, while their population could potentially expand proportional to k^n. Also, in a situation where there are multiple star-faring "species," a hegemonic, exponentially expanding entity might well be viewed by others as worse than obnoxious.
Given these reasonable assumptions, it seems likely to me that most space-faring civilizations of this level of technology will never experience any kind of pressure on living space. If you've ever read the Culture series (by Iain M. Banks) then you might reasonably expect such a civilization to "Sublime" before running out of space. Or to eventually alter themselves so as to remove the desire to procreate in a deliberate move to "retire" from the galactic stage.
I said "most" because there is of course the possibility that some species comes along that has the urge not just to procreate but to have as many children as possible as fast as possible, and manages to achieve this level of technology without ever altering this behavior. Such a species that is driven to expand its population as fast as possible may then experience restrictions on living space, but such a species would eventually have to enact population control, which could take the form of altering themselves to remove this urge to procreate as fast as possible and therefore will become just like "most space-faring civilizations".
From the POV of an outsider or a different species, would any entity care about the difference between "effectively/pretty much" and what you deem to be "actual" population control?
I doubt it.
So basically, you haven't been disagreeing with me, just splitting hairs on what the words "population control" means. I'm using a more generic criteria: Is the population controlled?
As I understand it, the argument is basically that, assuming true high-fidelity virtual reality is possible, then it's likely that any society that advances far enough technologically will eventually create a virtual world and populate it (or let it populate itself) with virtual beings that don't know they're in a virtual reality. Given this assumption, if you let the virtual reality run long enough, then the virtual beings inside the virtual reality will eventually end up creating yet another layer of virtual reality. Assuming this is possible at all, it then follows that there could be an effectively infinite number of virtual realities layered inside each other, and under those circumstances, it's extremely unlikely that our reality happens to be the outermost "real" reality but is instead somewhere in the stack of virtual realities.
It might not be 100% secure but it's not meant to be, either. Just more secure than nothing.
In order to qualify as a Type III civilization, you pretty much need to harvest ALL of the energy in a galaxy.
It's more likely that beyond a certain point you have all the energy you can use, and the limiting factor becomes collective intelligence.
I'd guess that in the same way that processors keep getting more efficient, so do civilisations. At the highest levels the energy signature of a civilisation is virtually indistinguishable from the cosmic microwave background - if it's observable at all.
Why is this more likely?
so assuming all life across the universe starts from similar beginnings as us, then this tells us something about what an advanced civilisation needs to be capable of to survive.