Author Topic: Aestivation Hypothesis  (Read 1062 times)

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Offline Snarks

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Aestivation Hypothesis
Came across this article early. Figured the folks here might find it interesting.

http://aleph.se/andart2/space/the-aestivation-hypothesis-popular-outline-and-faq/#What is the point?

I'm no physicist, but it seems strange that any lifeform with a limited life span would be happy just waiting until the Universe cools off so that its many greats later descendants can compute and think more efficiently. Also, wouldn't the universe cooling down make it more difficult to collect energy to be able to do things? It's an interesting hypothesis nonetheless.

 
Fermi's paradox is super cool. Arkane's Prey references it troughout too, which is rad (just a sidenote, it's a good game). The authors of the hypothesis itself are aware of it's own failings, and I adore the sick burns placed on Lovecraft at the end :P

But it is really interesting not in the concept of how other alien civilizations may be behaving: It's instead a very interesting hypothesis on how *our* civilization may behave in the future. The notion that an effective strategy to space exploitation is basically sandbagging is a very compelling one.

 

Offline The E

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I don't know -- This all seems to fall into a category of ideas that elicit nothing so much as a "so what?" reaction for me (Like, for example, the simulation argument). Even if this were happening, so what? What can we do with that knowledge?

My main criticism here is that this presupposes that waiting a few billion years for the universe to cool is more efficient than just doing the calculations you want now, at lower efficiency. The "Necessary Assumptions" section proposes Aestivation as a course of action for a civilization expanding "over sizable volumes", which the authors define as interstellar volumes, while still being recognizably the same culture with an ability to coordinate over vast time/space distances. They also propose that this civilization is good enough at eternity engineering to have a shot at waiting out until the universe reaches their desired end state. This, to my admittedly human sensibilities, strikes me as unlikely. Humans definitely couldn't do it without some fairly serious engineering to get us out of our evolutionary intelligence sump (Meaning: We are just intelligent enough for intelligence to cease being a selection factor, as a result, we are locked into our current state until and unless we actually do something about it).

Now, this of course doesn't mean that this is impossible. But it would take beings with a vastly different outlook from us to do it, and that makes the initial assumption (that sufficiently advanced civilizations work to increase their computational capacity at all points) suspect.
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Offline Bobboau

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well, hypothetically if we were in a simulation, we might possibly find a way to hack out of it. I know when I write physics simulations I don't add security to prevent the simulated objects from intentionally generating a buffer overflow that could send a set of commands resulting in a bunch of machines building a nanite plague that would reform our world into something my simulated objects would then upload themselves into.
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