Could extraterrestrials even consider conversation with humans worth the effort? When was the last time one of us flew to rural Pennsylvania to try to communicate with a snail?

Humans could be snails in the forest of animals in the Universe. Just as humans might wait for snails to evolve to be able to talk to us, ET might wait until we are able to talk to them.

My favorite explanation for the Fermi Paradox is that there have indeed been many intelligent civilizations but when they approach the Singularity they invariably wipe themselves out. This is because the dangers of new technology during that period will outpace the creatures’ ability to shed their evolutionary past — for example with humans we continue to be greedy and violent even though by some estimations we’re less than a century from the Singularity.

Basically I’m saying that advanced technology civilizations never last more than a couple centuries before hitting an existential catastrophe. There are so many possible such catastrophes that the odds quickly cancel out the Drake Equation. There can be mistakes with environment, mistakes with weapons, mistakes with pathogens, the creatures can get trapped in virtual realities, or lose the will to continue, or have some sort of religious apocalyptic war, or their sentient technology they create will destroy them and then die itself, etc. I know this is a pessimistic view, but I think it is consistent with the fact that evolution will favor entities that battle for supremacy, develop technology along the way, then that technology rapidly advances before they can manage their old greedy behavior.

My second favorite explanation is that we may actually be the first (or only). While the odds are extremely remote, someone has to be the first. It is like a statistician saying “no one can win a lottery” when in fact we know someone does despite the overwhelming odds.

Sure the survival of the biggest coward is a successful strategy in the savannah and that has probably been the one that helped humanity thwart much faster predators but the stellar environment is one of great distances between small oasis across the universe. Maybe instead of focusing on the strategies that helped humans advance we should refine a better abstraction of the stellar environment and then look for similar models in or own planetary ecology and see what is successful.

I applaud the paper for continuing the discussion and appreciate anything that encourages others to participate. And as doe Mr Brin. I enjoyed your books David. I read the Uplift Series as much as I’ve read my Tolkien. But to respond with a I said it first, to me, comes off a little conceited. Why can’t someone discuss the topic further because it has already been published. Should we never go to the moon again because some men over 50 years ago already went there. The rest of his response was engaging but I could have done without his need to stake a claim, or he could have found a better way of plugging his paper. After all he is a writer.

We likely haven’t the senses or ability to recognize contact with any significantly higher intelligence than ourselves.

Will our post-singularity selves even care about our pre-singularity, or will we have learned all we need from that stage and be focused elsewhere?

the great ‘empty space’ that we float in (compared to other galaxies is a bit… troubling – is it ONLY by chance?

simulation works out a lot of kinks (for me) and makes some sense in relation to what we’re seeing at the quantum level.

One unlikely but possible explanation is that such aliens don’t exist and never have. It is possible to conceive, and to hypothesize explanations for, the possibility that we’re it; humans may actually be the first life form in the universe to get to this stage. I’m not selling it hard, but it’s possible.

Anyway, I wouldn’t worry too much about ultra-violent, resource-hogging alien civilizations, and I’d hope we’d be good enough to mature into a civilization that will not itself go on to become an ultra-violent, resource-hogging force as we move out into the universe, should we encounter other life out there.

@AeaeaActual

Neo-Darwinian theory tells us that the replicators of the future (memes) will expand to fill all possible niches as rapidly as possible — because the ones that do not compete and expand aggressively will be out-competed by those that do.

Stealth is important, but evolution here on earth shows it is not a trump card — there are other ways to survive other than being stealthy.

Competition among memes does not require physical destruction of competitors — useful memes from one society can spread into the information processing systems of another and vice versa. Memes for cooperation will tend to win in the long run. Thus, advanced civilizations are more likely to merge than to destroy each other.

Advanced societies *may*have means and motive to avoid detection, but as to what those might be, we can only fancifully speculate.

Just because some collections of memes choose to remain hidden, this does not mean that other meme-groups will not expand to exploit available niches.

Only way to be sure :)