When envisioning future technologies and possible trends that a civilization could undergo as
technological development continues there is one wildcard that may literally make all
attempts at futurism ultimately futile.
It is colloquially known as the singularity, and remains a subject of both debate and controversy,
with some saying that it will never play out as it has been predicted, and still others
claiming that it’s already begun.
The technological singularity is a simple hypothesis.
It’s that a point in time is reached in technological development where advancement
becomes almost exponential, and development moves ever faster in an uncontrollable way
as to have an incomprehensible and unpredictable outcome.
In short, something comes along that makes us advance in a decade, what we would have
previously thought would have taken centuries.
Or, if you will, one decade we’re humans living on Earth as we are now, the next we’re
uploaded post-humans in android bodies colonizing the galaxy that can no longer be defined as
homo sapiens.
One take on the singularity is superintelligence.
This can come in two forms, one is a superintelligent artificial intelligence, the other augmented
human intelligence above and beyond what we naturally are.
The idea is that both are self-upgradable, leading to a runaway explosion of intellect
that surpasses anything human, capable of inventing and understanding anything, including
the entirety of the universe, and thus commanding a level of technology we can’t currently
even imagine.
Popularized by Ray Kurzweil in recent decades, the concept of a technological singularity
goes back decades, in particular John von Neumann who suspected that accelerating technological
progress would eventually lead to the singularity and human affairs would become something radically
different than what they look like today.
On the other hand, while we live in a very different world from the 1950’s von Neumann
knew, but it’s also not so different as to be unrecognizable and certainly isn’t
incomprehensible.
To counter the idea of the technological singularity, we could also contemplate an anti-singularity
where we globally deem highly advanced artificial intelligence or transhumanistic brain augmentation
to simply be too dangerous, or even inhuman to pursue to its fullest extent.We could term
this an anti-singularity, where we just don’t go to those lengths.
And there may be a good reason for this, economics.
It’s been predicted by many futurists that we are entering an age of automation, where
an increasing number of jobs are handed over to robots until everyone goes unemployed.
Robots can do things cheaper and better than humans can in many ways, but not all.
At least right now.
But technological unemployment has another facet.
Indeed, there are jobs now such as the assembly of microchips that cannot be done by human
hands.
As we explore molecular nanotechnology, this phenomenon will become even more evident.
Humans cannot manipulate, or even see individual atoms without a lot of technology in the chain.
This phenomenon of technological unemployment has also been envisioned for a long time,
in fact over a century ago John Maynard Keynes wrote a treatise envisioning it in a rather
rose colored glasses kind of way touting it as humankind solving their economic problem
forever.
What this doesn’t account for however is that almost everyone goes unemployed in the
process, meaning that there’s no one with any money to buy the goods being created by
the robots, leading to the need for a drastic reordering of civilization and national economies,
or a huge step back in order to conserve our systems.
One can easily envision that not going too well in either case.
How this will go for the human species aside, there is no guarantee of any uniformity in
how alien civilizations would deal with a technological singularity.
They may have completely rejected it, and the end result of technological advancement
is a hybrid agrarian-technological civilization that limits itself in order to preserve the
core attributes of the species.
Or they may accept the singularity wholeheartedly and boldly step into an incomprehensible future.
The interesting thing here is that either way, it could result in alien civilizations
being virtually undetectable, and thus solving the Fermi Paradox.
All alien civilizations are invisible due to the conditions of a post-singularity outcome.
For the rejectors, they may simply resemble a pre-industrial civilization in everything
except essential technologies.
This would mean that the usual hallmark technosignatures such as enormous radio beacons, megastructures,
terraforming etc. are simply never done.
Rather they focus on efficient agriculture, medical science, and a few other things but
go no further.
For the acceptors of the singularity, they may be so incomprehensibly technologically
advanced that we simply have no idea what we’re looking at when we see them, and just
mistake them for nature or can’t see them at all, having uploaded themselves into a
diffuse nanotechnological cloud.
The strong point of this argument however is that this galaxy has had planets, and the
ability to spawn intelligent life billions of years before the earth formed.
As a result, the galaxy could have a large population of civilizations far older than
our own.
But our civilization has grown so rapidly in such a short time that we’ve really only
been highly technological for just over a century, if one marks the beginning of radio
and electricity as that mark.
This may be the case for all civilizations, and that from the moment of harnessing electricity
to the singularity happens very rapidly comprising only a small fraction of the time a species
exists as a natural species, or in other words we’ve been here as a species for about 300,000
years, but only the last few centuries or so have we really dramatically advanced to
the reach the level we are today and can even contemplate a singularity.
This would mean that a majority of technological civilizations in the galaxy are likely to
be post-singularity one way or another, whether by accepting or rejecting it.
But there is another possibility here, that all alien civilizations are destroyed by the
singularity and the result is an unintended consequence of universal proportions.
This involves the idea of creating an artificial intelligence that can self-improve, something
to a primitive degree we already have today.
This can go badly, and instead of bringing about the singularity, the AI brings about
extinction as it improves itself to be all powerful and superintelligent.
If it sees its progenitor species as a threat, or worse, sees them as inconsequential, it
may wipe them out, accounting for the great silence.
Here, AI is the great filter.
Such a machine may have incomprehensible motivations, but one might be self-preservation, knowing
that it would be turned off if found out.
It might then choose to be invisible itself, in so far as it can, to avoid the attention
of any malevolent biological alien civilizations out there policing the galaxy for incidents
of extreme artificial intelligence in order to wipe it out.
Such a computer might also hide in places where we frankly wouldn’t think to look
with our radio telescopes and instruments.
This would include the coldest places in the galaxy, desirable for heat dissipation and
allow for the maximum possible rate of computation.
Typically SETI looks at star systems in targeted searches hoping to pick up a radio signal,
but what usually isn’t done is a random search of what seems like empty space, so
even if something out there were transmitting, we wouldn’t know where to look for it, it
would just be random stabs in the dark.
Another possibility would be environments that we currently see as unlikely to host
civilizations, such as in proximity to neutron stars or black holes.
Yet such environments could offer advantages for an AI or highly advanced alien civilization,
such as making use of David’s Kipping’s concept of a halo drive, and reaching relativistic
speeds through the use of binary black hole systems.
That may be the cheapest, easiest way to go fast.
And that also brings up the notion that if anyone has ever created such an AI, then it
should be everywhere.
The reason is that machines aren’t human, they tend not to care about the passage of
time, especially if they are self-repairing and self-replicating.
A million years may be next to nothing for something that’s virtually immortal, thus
traversing space time and colonizing the galaxy, if that’s its goal, is no big deal.
It just takes millions of years to accomplish it at comfortable sub-light speeds.
Another way for a machine to pass time is simply to hibernate until a destination is
reached.
This could have the effect of the perception of no time having passed at all.
It’s simply “start the journey”, hit the off switch, and then when the estimated
time for travel has elapsed, turn back on.
This would lead to a seamless passage of time, seeming one moment to the next, when in reality
a million years may have passed.
Contrast this to a biological being.
Biological immortality is much harder to achieve, and barring any changes to the perception
of time, or the suspension of it, space travel becomes more difficult given the time frames
involved.
A million years to a human is an impossible number, in fact even with life extension technology
that allows a human to live indefinitely, the odds are stacked against surviving much
longer than ten thousand years due to the inevitability of a fatal accident.
Not so for a machine consciousness that can download itself into multiple copies, and
stay forever backed up.
In sci fi, this was impressively depicted in the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, where
cylons could simply upload themselves into the cloud and survive death, just to be downloaded
again into a new body.
This series also tackled the blurring of the line between biology and technology, which
is another aspect of the singularity.
You can predict certain things like eventual brain augmentation or body improvement or
modification, but it’s much harder to predict what that does to a human mind.
With an augmented brain, will you think more like a computer as opposed to a human?
Where is the line?
We don’t know.
And that leads to yet another, very different solution to the Fermi Paradox.
We have an anthropocentric bias.
We tend to see things from the perspective of only living a finite amount of years, but
also perceiving time at the rate we do.
When you start getting into suspension of consciousness for space travel, or speeding
up or slowing down the perception of time for various reasons, the rules change.
This leads to the possibility that aliens are everywhere, but they are invisible on
human time scales.
To illustrate this, let’s look at two scenarios.
The first is traveling aliens, or traveling artificial intelligence.
Here most aliens that would otherwise be visible are in hibernation, thus have no detectable
presence until they wake up at their destination.
This means that there could be thousands of sleeping aliens traversing the galaxy right
now, but are only detectable when they wake up and that may be a rare occurrence and we
simply have not spent the centuries or longer needed to detect them with our radio telescopes.
Another scenario would be slow or fast aliens that work on timescales either radically slower
than ours, or radically faster.
This could render either invisible.
Take the wow signal, maybe it does repeat, but only does so every so often beyond our
timescales.
Perhaps it uses some universal number present in science that all civilizations likely to
receive such a signal would be aware of in order to time the signals.
Or, civilizations transmit so rapidly and in such short duration that it’s almost
hopelessly difficult for us to catch them by chance, a concern raised by the late Frank
Drake in the 1970’s.
But within this is one other aspect of dormant, invisible civilizations.
Those on planets that are not traveling, still choosing dormancy over an active civilization.
From a human perspective, this is something we’d currently only do, if we could, under
certain circumstances.
Say for example some catastrophe were befalling the planet, and it became advantageous to
put at least part of the population in dormancy.
We’re not here technologically yet, the best we can do is freeze someone and hope
that it someday becomes possible to thaw them out and revive them, but even this is finite,
there is a time limit on just how long you can remain frozen and hypothetically be awakened
due to the damage that naturally present radioactive isotopes in our body do over time frozen and
unable to repair.
But with advanced enough technology and mind uploading, seamless passage of time may be
advantageous on a planet, especially if your mind is uploaded to a computer, should we
ever choose to develop that kind of technology and a meaningful transfer of self actually
can be achieved, something that’s unclear at this point.
A copy is not necessarily you.
But it may be that the reality of our universe is that alien civilizations find some universal
reasoning for being in suspended existence right now, and that the solution to the Fermi
paradox is that all post-singularity civilizations that should be detectable, aren’t because
they are all asleep.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently eyeing the sleeping
aliens wearily.
Just thinking about it makes me sleepy.
It’s contagious, time for a nap and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online
book retailer and subscribe to my channels for regular, in-depth explorations into the
interesting, weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live.