It’s fantastical to believe a highly advanced spacefaring civilization with over 30M years under its belt could exist without an extreme energy, material, and environmental footprint. Again, look at the accumulation of waste and the progression of energy consumption over just under 60 years here on earth.

In terms of the sheer energy and material requirements. Look at the timescale of our civilization for reference. The waste heat generated would be another byproduct that would be a dead giveaway.

I don't know, physical matter and energy still sounds like the same resources, unless you think AGI would magically be able to leave the universe to some spirit dimension?

Is there a similarity between Freudian psychoanalysis and evaluating the evidence for the existence of super AGI existence? No matter what you do, you want to fuck your mom.

that's a good point. capitalism is pretty weird. i'm curious-is your position falsifiable? like if the market moved to promoting and enacting like advanced fusion reactors, sustainable practices etcwould you be like "oh i was wrong"?

Alright Dr. Land cool it

Yeah I dig the idea of corporations being slow AI, too.

That’s basically the plot. Alistair Reynolds writes some pretty gourmet shit.

Hanson coined the term "Great Filter" in his paper [here](https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/greatfilter.html) but when he talked about the possibility that the filter might just consist of multiple evolutionary "hard steps" in the past (the most likely answer to the paradox IMO), he was largely summarizing ideas that had been written up by the astrophysicist [Brandon Carter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Carter), who also coined the term "anthropic principle"--Carter talks about the notion of "critical steps" in evolution in [this paper](http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/Carter_Phil_Trans_1983.pdf), on p. 149 (the number at the bottom of the page, not the upper left). One point to keep in mind about a past Great Filter is that you could have a sequence of just moderately improbable steps needed to get from the initial formation of a planetary system to a planet with intelligent life, but if you multiply them all together that could result in an astronomically tiny probability. Candidates for improbable events could include both evolutionary steps like the origin of life and the origin of eukaryote-like cells and the origin of multicellular organisms, along with unlikely events in the initial formation of the planetary system, like all the gas giants being as far from the sun as they are in our system (which seems to be very unusual compared to [known exoplanet systems](https://astrobites.org/2015/03/26/jupiter-is-my-shepherd-that-i-shall-not-want/)), or an Earthlike planet with a large moon that can stabilize its axial tilt--more discussion of possibly unlikely aspects of our solar system, even before the origin of life, can be found in the book [*Rare Earth*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare_Earth_%28book%29). If there are indeed multiple hard steps like this, it wouldn't take that many to get an astronomically small probability of intelligence arising. For instance, say you have 10 sequential steps that each have only a 1 in 100 chance of happening in any system that makes it through the prior steps before the planet becomes uninhabitable due to the expanding sun--together that would mean only 1 in 10^20 systems would develop intelligent life, a very tiny number given the Milky Way only has about 10^11 stars. Hanson also gave a statistical argument that if there are a number of sequential hard steps in evolution, then if we imagine sampling a vast number of planetary systems and focusing on the small subset that happened to get through all of them in time before the sun died, we should expect that on average the steps would take approximately equal amounts of time to get through in the history of the "successful" worlds, even if the probabilities of different steps were quite different (for example, if one step has a 1/100 chance and another has a 1/100,000 chance). He summarizes this idea in the "Reconsidering biology" section of the paper where he makes an analogy with a lockpicker who only has a short finite amount of time to guess a series of numbers on a combination lock, but where there are many trials so we can consider the spacing of successful guesses on the rare trials where they got through them all and picked the lock, and it turns out the spacings are about equal even if the probabilities of guessing each number are very different (he gave a technical derivation in [this paper](http://hanson.gmu.edu/hardstep.pdf), and seems to say on p. 6 that this is a new result that goes beyond Brandon Carter's analysis). He then points to some candidates for past hard steps that seem about equally spaced in time, suggesting he thinks it's plausible the Great Filter is a series of past hard steps, rather than a future civilization-killing Great Filter like rogue AI or grey goo. Paul Davies does a similar analysis in his book *The Eerie Silence*, in the section on the Great Filter--he suggests a number of possible hard steps that are spaced on average about 800 million years apart, his candidates being "first, the origin of life itself; second, the evolution of photosynthesis in bacteria 3.5 billion years ago; third, the emergence of 'eukaryotes' (large, complex cells with nuclei) about 2.5 billion years ago; fourth, sexual reproduction about 1.2 billion years ago; fifth, the explosion of large multicellular organisms 600 million years ago; and finally, the arrival of brainy hominids in the recent past". Another interesting point is that the same lockpicker style argument suggests that if the lucky worlds have hard steps about 800 million years apart, the last one should happen about 800 million years before the end of the planet's habitable period for complex life, so on most planets that do evolve intelligent life it will have happened "just under the wire" (Brandon Carter seems to have noted this point in the paper of his I linked earlier, on p. 151 where he said that his mathematical model 'implies that with a relative probability close to unity the completion of the n critical steps within the allowed time range ... will occur near the end of this range to within a fraction of the order of magnitude of 1/n'). As it turns out, there is an [independent argument](http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=908) that barring intervention by a technological civilization, the Earth will probably become uninhabitable for multicellular life somewhere between 500 million and a billion years from now, because of a long-term drop in the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere as the sun gets slowly brighter and speeds up silicate rock weathering, which draws carbon molecules from the air. In a rough way this could be seen as a successful "prediction" of the hard step model, since both Carter and Hanson were unaware of it and expressed puzzlement that the time span between plausible candidates for hard steps was much smaller than the time they supposed the Earth would remain habitable (see Carter's comments on p. 151-152 of the paper I linked, along with Hanson's comments in [this 2013 post](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/09/fewer-harder-steps.html)). Carter also has a 2008 paper [here](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/abs/five-or-sixstep-scenario-for-evolution/841C9AC57BFBD5491756EB5951572B36) (paywalled, but if you are OK with using [sci-hub](https://www.science.org/content/article/frustrated-science-student-behind-sci-hub) it can be read [here](https://sci-hub.se/10.1017/S1473550408004023)) where he comments that the new estimate for the future habitable lifetime of the Earth leads him to favor a model with around 6 hard steps.

Yeah, I wanted to talk about the fermi paradox in relation to ai doommongering.