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Fermi's Paradox and the Psychology of Galactic Empires | Matthew O´Dowd | TEDxTUWien

Apr 09, 2020
I grew up in a working class suburb of Melbourne, Australia, no one in my family had ever been to university. Actually, it's statistically very unlikely that I'm here right now in Vienna about to talk about the future of humanity, uh, with some extremely new scientific results on the

psychology

of the Galactic Empires, so mine is not a substory, Although my working-class parents understood the importance of the perspective of example, they wanted us to know what was possible, my five siblings and I were exposed to things for which they For example, Sunday afternoons were spent listening to programs BBC scientists on the radio, lots of dignified old British voices talking about the magnificence of the universe, which really instilled in me and my brothers this sense of curiosity that we help each other maintain and that has helped us overcome our history. lives and for me in particular it showed me something that I didn't really know at the time and that was that it was possible to have a career speaking and doing science, knowing what is possible helps make things possible that also apply to populations.
fermi s paradox and the psychology of galactic empires matthew o dowd tedxtuwien
So communities, nations, and tribes of old inspire and influence each other by sharing art, science, and wisdom, and a feedback process spreads the further humanity advances. This took a long time, before we spent 200,000 years as hunter-gatherers in the African savanna. a degree of mutual feedback exchange propagated us to this elbow of the exponential where we find ourselves today, we are now about to take command of our own genome to create artificial intelligences to understand the very origin of our universe and the gods that we know. We have rockets as a civilization that acts more than ever in a unified manner as a species.
fermi s paradox and the psychology of galactic empires matthew o dowd tedxtuwien

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fermi s paradox and the psychology of galactic empires matthew o dowd tedxtuwien...

Who do we look at next? Where is our example? Where are those who came before us stretching out their hands to show us the way to whatever comes next? Transition is and this is a question we've been asking ourselves since we thought there might be others. Well, there were others out there. Seems like a good time for a famous quote. Ah, I see, Clark said there are two possibilities. Either we are alone in the universe or we are not, both are equally terrifying and when he said this in the 60s we had never seen a planet around another star system.
fermi s paradox and the psychology of galactic empires matthew o dowd tedxtuwien
Our studies of the galaxy were in their infancy, as were the searches for the Seti programs. extraterrestrial intelligence we didn't know if they were extraterrestrials, but we hadn't actually searched everything we knew, the galaxy could have been awfully full of technological civilizations, but now that we've examined large portions of our galaxy, the SL digital Sky study has taken spectroscopic observations of more than two and a half million stars. Almost all of those stars have planetary systems, as discovered by the Kepler space telescope. By observing the tiny dimming of light as distant alien worlds pass in front of their parent star, we have now determined that almost every star in the Milky Way has a planetary system, and there are tens of billions of Earth-like planets.
fermi s paradox and the psychology of galactic empires matthew o dowd tedxtuwien
Earth with the potential to have liquid water that supports life and then there is the Trappist system. The Trappist telescope found a star just 10 light-years away, which is our most immediate cosmic neighborhood star that has seven terrestrial worlds, many of which are potentially habitable. The number of potential places for life in our galaxy has skyrocketed in recent years. Many of them may have life and, in fact, when we turn our science inward when we look. Earth and what it can tell us about life, we now know many of them probably, so we look further and further back into Earth's history.
This is a fossil of slimy algae layers dating back 3.7 billion years. Okay, this is a stromatolite found in In Greenland there are equally old 3.5 billion year old stromatolites found in my hometown, well, in my home country, Australia, and even more intriguing, this is an Australian zircon crystal. Those little patches are little bits of carbon with a surprisingly biogenic isotopic ratio. It seems that where the carbon comes from. life and this thing is up to 4.1 billion years old, the latest just this year hematite formations that look like all over the world the types of small hematite tubes built by bacteria in deep-sea hydrothermal vents this thing is 4.2 billion years old years within a cosmic universe A flicker of Earth coalescing from space dust 4.5 billion years ago, it appears that life occurs rapidly and with high probability when the conditions are right, it certainly happened on Earth and there is no reason to believe the same would not happen elsewhere.
For all we know, the galaxy should be full of at least slime-covered planets, why shouldn't some of them follow our path of development and produce technological species before us? Well, we certainly don't see them, we've been looking. with our best radio telescopes for half a century, but the galaxy is silent, the SLO spectra of the stars slavishly obey the known laws of stellar physics. The

galactic

radio chatter is non-existent and everything seems eerily natural, there are a couple of exceptions, there is this one. star tabis star in the Kepler sample that appears to be Di in strange ways um, people talk about it being an alien megastructure, it's almost certainly not an alien megastructure, although almost as it was flying here came the announcement that it had begun to dim again. after a two year hiatus, um, we'll know very soon if we need to write up all this talk, uh, it's probably not an alien megastructure, uh, but anyway, it's very clear that if something like us exists, they are surprisingly and surprisingly rare So this tension between the apparent abundance of potential places for life to begin and the complete absence of any evidence that anything like us ever existed before is called, of course, the fmy

paradox

, after the great physicist Ricoh Fery who asked in 1950 where is Everyone, the FY

paradox

is more paradoxical today, knowing what we know now, so the F paradox is about time scales.
Our son is about 5 billion years old, but the Milky Way is more than twice that age. There are countless stars like our suns. like our sun, countless solar systems, like our solar system, many of them billions of years ahead of us, but a cosmic blink of an advantage in development is countless generations for a civilization that managed to get ahead of us, what could do? with those Generations that I don't know fill their part of the Galaxy with spheres and light-collecting rays uh they send colonization waves that multiply exponentially or maybe interstellar travel is actually almost impossible um still automatic self-replicating probes proposed by Von neyman in the 50s could fill our galaxy in that cosmic eye blinks and if you're the stay-at-home type, huge beacons that send out electromagnetic radiation for us to detect powered by cosmic energy sources, we obviously don't see any of this, but it's just You would need a small number of them to be very, very evident in the absence of evidence of a mentoring career from someone who has gone before us.
Can we at least take that absence as some kind of guide? The answer to that question, well, to answer it is to solve the burning paradox, the solution to The paradox is often framed in terms of a great filter, some stage of development that is so difficult or so unlikely to overcome that almost no one succeeds and The interesting question is: is that stage behind us or is it ahead of us? We are lucky? And are we unique in the Galaxy for having somehow overcome a very difficult adolescence of development to reach our current space or are civilizations like ours super common?
It's happened many times in the past a civilization builds some cities has a full-fledged link The space program throws out some nice conferences and then bam with amazing efficiency, in fact, perfect efficiency, they all get erased until they get to a good one, that is a compelling question. I think even Arthur C Clark would agree that that's the scariest potential option, um, and the good thing about our current position is that we actually have some information, now we finally have a single data point that will allow us to do an educated guess about where that big filter is and what it means for our next step, so if that filter is a catastrophe, that's bad. but it's not necessarily a catastrophe, it may be that in the future advanced civilizations become, let's say, inscrutable right now, humanity is about unrestricted expansion, epic acts of

galactic

graffiti sound fun, but surely with advancement technological divine also comes a similar measure of cultural sociology.
Psychological Evolution, perhaps once you have the technology to reach the Stars, you are immediately inclined to enter a state of galaxy-wide Harmony in which you with perfect efficiency enforce one prime directive: remain hidden until we are worthy of see you or perhaps a civilization that they all turn inward into incredibly complex virtual worlds and lose complete interest in the stars of the galaxy or perhaps our ant intellects cannot even hope to understand the motives of an advanced civilization , perhaps our ant-like sentience cannot sense their divine technologies, how does an ant-like intellect try to understand the motives of an advanced civilization?
How do we guess the

psychology

of the Galactic Empire? And that's new information that we've developed over the last 10 years that we've never found. In the Galactic Empire we have not seen aliens, but we have located a protogalactic civilization that appears to be within a handful of generations of being able to make the type of Mark in at least one system that could be detectable from a great distance. No, but the probability that it can do so is increasing. I'm talking about us, of course. Okay, clarify the Kep program. Okay, the Kepler Observatory was a collaboration between thousands of scientists under the control of a huge National Space Program.
I'm talking. About NASA, of course, in a sense we could say that Kepler was the will of the people, it was subject to the budget approval of elected officials in the past. Giant scientific programs, such as the solitary survey, were carried out by hundreds or thousands of scientists, dozens of investigations. the institutions, great science was always very collaborative, very collective, very egalitarian, the most important science, like the Apollo program, which put the first person in another world, took over the Nations. JFK said: we choose to go to the Moon, we choose to go to Mars to mine the asteroids. we will choose to engage in large scale astroengineering projects we will choose to send probes to other worlds no we will not choose these things they will almost certainly be started by individuals at this time there are a handful of private companies that are currently operating spacecraft for low earth orbit and many more with ships and other space programs in development Yuri Milner provided the initial financing for the Breakthrough star shot program, which has every chance of placing a probe, admittedly small, in the nearest star system within half a century.
You don't choose to do these things, you choose and by you I mean anyone with the talent and the passion or the billions to bring enough people along for the ride; There are currently a handful of people with levels of autocratic control over entire space programs that The number will only increase within generations that will be from hundreds to a million at minimum and the bar is now being lowered so low. Technological advances in the future, reusable rockets, advances in propulsion systems, our ability to design in space, 3D printing on the Moon or Mars of entire structures, the unlimited and almost unthinkable resources of the asteroid belt will drive projects that today we cannot even conceive these things seem very likely to happen we are in the shadows we are at the elbow of exponential things like Dyson spheres and Von Nyman probes they are not the distant future of humanity, they are the near or medium future of humanity, uh, they may not happen and we don't know where it will proceed beyond that elbow, maybe nothing will come of it, but now I know what the possibilities are and they certainly aren't zero, there are many paths beyond that elbow who leave an indelible mark on our solar system, if not our part of the galaxy, and Mark answers Ferm's question, where is everyone?
Hey guys, we're here, so our technology is rapidly outpacing our ability to collectively choose whether to use it or not, whether or not to for example go to the stars, we really don't.There is reason to believe that other civilizations coming to our state will do so uniformly with the less individualistic motives we present. In this current state we are a perfectly good model for the psychology of an advanced civilization, assuming we are a perfectly good model for the psychology of ourselves 100 or 200 years from now, so you give a civilization like ours or you know Any of the many that came before us are just a handful of generations doing what we can do at our current pace and honestly, some crazy things are going to be tried, so why is the Galaxy so quiet?
Well, if we take ourselves as a model, then it means that no one else survives in our state and it's a little difficult to escape that conclusion, given the numbers, which are a little bleak, but I think also our exponential progress gives us something Of hope if we're going to end ourselves, okay? having to do it quickly because time is ticking, we only have a small number of generations to destroy our civilization to the Stone Age, perhaps before we are able to make that Mark and even if we do, we know we may not make it let's do.
So by that model, someone before us, one in 100, even one in a thousand, would need to surpass our current initial state for Mark to be okay, and yet we don't see him for that reason. I think the answer is a little more cheerful. I think the most likely solution to the burning paradox, given the latest information on how we will proceed or at least try to do so, is that the filter, although it exists, is behind us, there is something special about humanity, don't be arrogant, there could be been very far back on the evolutionary tree, perhaps that possibility of fusion of protoeukaryotes, protomitochondria to forge the modern complex cell is one in billions or perhaps it is humanity, perhaps.
There was a rewiring on the plains of Africa Homo sapiens suddenly learned to think in different ways and Harari would say that we learned to believe fictions we learned to believe in things like a destiny Galactic Empires but we imagined Futures and set our eyes first on the world and then in the stars, we look at the galaxy and it seems like a natural and untamed desert, without footprints, but I really believe that we can be incredibly inspired by that fact that there may be no one to show us the way and that means that we ourselves discover that we can continue the clue ourselves, uh, whatever luck has led us to hear whatever is holding back any other possible incidence of something like us puts us in a position to potentially arrive early, what if we arrive early? to the Galaxy and what would happen if a destiny we could choose was for us to be the ones to forge that path to lend a hand to anyone who comes after, thank you.

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