Metric
04-13-2006, 04:01 PM
Ray Kurzweil makes a good argument for the exponential growth of sophistication, which has held roughly constant all the way through the history of evolution of life up until now, with the growth of our technology. He argues that if this continues, humans will eventually overcome their biological limitations and continue the acceleration of our computational power at an ever increasing rate. The final stage of this, which he calls "epoch 6," culminates with humanity saturating the computational resources of this planet, and expanding "outward" by necessity at some surprisingly large fraction of the speed of light, saturating other worlds etc. as we go. The interesting thing, though, is that the timescale for us to reach this level of sophistication is surprisingly short, due to the exponential trend in the growth of technology.
This makes a powerful argument that we are at least "locally" alone in our universe. Once an intelligence evolves (the timescale of which is on the order of a billion years), the timescale for it to reach "epoch 6" is very tiny by comparison. Thus if an intelligence exists, e.g. in our galaxy, we would almost certainly see the effects or have our own solar system saturated by alien intelligence.
Since the timescale of evolution of intelligence is on the order of a billion years, it seems logical to me that the natural distance scale between the meeting of intelligences is on the order of a billion light-years. At shorter distance scales, it's all about simply being first, since the first intelligence to evolve will very quickly be expanding at roughly the speed of light, and saturate the vicinity of any "not quite evolved" intelligence that simply missed being the first by a million years. However, out past a billion light-years (roughly), there remains enough time for another intelligence to continue to evolve, even as the first intelligence continues expanding outward at an extremely rapid rate.
Thus the timescale for evolution essentially sets the "distance scale" of where one "epoch 6" civilization can expect to run into another "epoch 6" civilization.
Note, though, that a billion light-years is a huge distance! Superclusters of galaxies exist on the scale of 100's of millions of light years. Thus, instead of a "Star Trek" or "Star Wars" picture of interacting intelligences on a "solar system to solar system" scale, it seems much more likely to me that intelligences will actually interact on a galactic supercluster-to-supercluster scale, very possibly with our decendants running the Virgo supercluster (though one has to wonder about the nature of the interaction -- will they war for resources? will they merge? it is interesting that the timescale for communication within one of these "empires" is also a billion years -- what effect will that have on interaction with other ones?)
This makes a powerful argument that we are at least "locally" alone in our universe. Once an intelligence evolves (the timescale of which is on the order of a billion years), the timescale for it to reach "epoch 6" is very tiny by comparison. Thus if an intelligence exists, e.g. in our galaxy, we would almost certainly see the effects or have our own solar system saturated by alien intelligence.
Since the timescale of evolution of intelligence is on the order of a billion years, it seems logical to me that the natural distance scale between the meeting of intelligences is on the order of a billion light-years. At shorter distance scales, it's all about simply being first, since the first intelligence to evolve will very quickly be expanding at roughly the speed of light, and saturate the vicinity of any "not quite evolved" intelligence that simply missed being the first by a million years. However, out past a billion light-years (roughly), there remains enough time for another intelligence to continue to evolve, even as the first intelligence continues expanding outward at an extremely rapid rate.
Thus the timescale for evolution essentially sets the "distance scale" of where one "epoch 6" civilization can expect to run into another "epoch 6" civilization.
Note, though, that a billion light-years is a huge distance! Superclusters of galaxies exist on the scale of 100's of millions of light years. Thus, instead of a "Star Trek" or "Star Wars" picture of interacting intelligences on a "solar system to solar system" scale, it seems much more likely to me that intelligences will actually interact on a galactic supercluster-to-supercluster scale, very possibly with our decendants running the Virgo supercluster (though one has to wonder about the nature of the interaction -- will they war for resources? will they merge? it is interesting that the timescale for communication within one of these "empires" is also a billion years -- what effect will that have on interaction with other ones?)