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Comment by ledauphin | Hacker News Reader

I read this whole article and I can't figure out what they're actually claiming, other than some version of "we should try to imagine that things might be different than we imagine."

can somebody (or ChatGPT) take a stab at making this make more sense?

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We’re not considering the possibility that most civilizations will consider progress to be a move to a utopian state of living in harmony with nature, with buried machines. Not paving the planet and the sun with solar panels.

Advanced civilizations may be indistinguishable from nature, as they prioritize sustainability by integrating their technology into their planet’s biosphere rather than expanding destructively. This challenges assumptions like exponential growth and the Kardashev Scale, suggesting that undetectable, harmonious technospheres could be the norm. Researchers argue for rethinking planetary histories, sustainability, and life beyond Earth to better understand the Fermi Paradox.

One thing that immediately came to mind upon seeing the title is the way that efficient (digital) radio communications look much more similar to noise (due to information density) than old analog communication methods.

The article seems to be looking at things from an energy-usage perspective. Why don't we detect Dyson spheres and other large-scale technological projects? Maybe the most efficient ways of harnessing the energy of a planet blend in with the natural processes of the planet itself.

Or, as a sibling comment suggested, maybe the civilization that makes (alien) people happiest is one that outwardly resembles the world they evolved in.

They claim one resolution to the Fermi paradox is that civilizations tend to evolve toward a state that resembles nature (non-industrial or non-civilizational, I'm not sure).

So the idea of a highly advanced civilization requiring so little resource extraction, or even being able to entirely synthesize all its resource needs from energy, and manage global resources in a non-destructive way, while letting the natural ecology revert to as close as possible to a pre-civilizational state.

So you see small hubs of super-high-density cities, and vast expanses of "nature". Harder to detect from space that way, thus it could resolve the paradox?

You can see our own time moving that direction with urbanization and re-greening happening simultaneously, population growth falling, and a huge effort to abolish the use of one particular variety of extracted resource.

The 'plastic rock' formations off Brazil [1] may be something? Like if advanced civilizations incorporate some element of time/pressure/environments to something, the plastic that has melted, merged, and reformed into rock formations may produce newer elements that turn out to be breakthroughs?

[1] https://phys.org/news/2023-03-scientists-disturbing-remote-i...

I think it's saying something like: what if it's impossible for a civilization to grow big enough or quick enough with our current technological path to make the bigger steps like harnessing the energy of our star and becoming space-faring. Perhaps instead there's some other path that looks more like nature which is why we can't detect it.

Like what if it was easier to master biology, create some kind of biologic computer distributed amongst all the living things on a planet, and load all the consciousnesses of the advanced beings onto that.

Sales pitch for sustainability tax on space economy.

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