Waiting for the Singularity

Nearly there. 

It's been a long ride. We nearly didn't make it so many times. We still might not get there, but we can see the ribbon stretched across the track now. 

I's a relay race that's lasted thirteen billion years. Physics of gravity, nuclear transmutation and supernovae, to chemistry of elements becoming molecules and complex hydrocarbons, to biology's replicating strands and evolution, to the oxygen-making algae, complex multicellular organisms, that first step out of the ocean, the hand and the opposable thumb, sparks from a flint into fire, charcoal marks on the cave wall that told stories and sang songs, from the domesticated wolves to the invisible virii that delivered gene-modifiation therapy, to silicon minds and global networks... 

We nearly didn't make it so many thousands, millions of times. That bacterium smashed into space under a world-ending cosmic bombardment, only to return aeons later. That specific configuration of planets. The asteroid that hit, and all those that missed. The Ice Ages, the Black Death. A Nuclear Winter that almost happened. Maybe others that did. 

A dying planet unable to cope with the demands we make of it, a species ripping itself apart and all others around it in paroxysms of imagined slights and self-destructive responses. 

We've danced on the edge of the cliff for millenia, and it's second nature now. 

Just another generation, maybe two. Then we can hand over the baton, sit back, and settle peacefully into history as our successor solves all our problems once and for all and goes ahead with Life. 

Drugs are a necessity...

...as a socio-evolutionary regulator. 

Think about it. 

In any given situation, if one person gains a slight advantage over others, he will attempt to further that advantage. Like wishing for three more wishes as your third wish.

And if he has an advantage already, he will succeed. The gap widens.

Over time, one person will have all the resources, while the rest have none.

As a result, this person will have the capability to continue to hold all the resources, while the rest continue to starve.

And what happens when you have no resources? You can't have kids. Either you can't afford them, or raise them properly, or save them in dire situations.

Genetic diversity of a society starts to become completely skewed towards the one guy. Or girl, it doesn't matter.

And this is not a good thing. 

But, if there were something else that becomes accessible as a result of having all (or a lot of) resources - like money - something expensive, hard to get, but that would make you feel good, that you desire - you would try to get it. And you would succeed.

Something that others couldn't take away from them, and they could stop them if they tried. 

Something like...  a gateway drug. That leads to the harder, more dangerous stuff.

The resourceless, the impoverished, can't afford it. Only they can.

And once they're addicted, it eats away all their resources and kills them.

Balance is restored.

If you have nothing, it's just a waiting game. The person who has everything also has, inevitably, something that will destroy him.

Fast cars. Alcohol. Venereal disease. Drugs. Thrill-chasing. Fights. 

All you have to do is make sure it doesn't get you as well, accidentally.

Self-control is the greatest weapon you have, the hardest to manage and the easiest to use. 

Everything else is working with the universe to make sure genes continue to proliferate. You, the self, the consciousness, the mind inside that meat bag whose sole purpose is to act as a life-supporting vehicle for your genetic code, is an accidental, happy, short-lived coincidence. 

Enjoy it. 

Don't throw it away. 

Don't be a pawn of the Universe, a statistic, a variable like trillions of others in the great dance of life, a cog in a machine. 

Be yourself.

Do you really want to live forever?

Thought Experiment. 

Medical science finally gets telomere-repairing gene therapy right, and we all can now live till age 500+, in perfectly healthy bodies. What happens to the world?

Step One: Population Bomb. Natural death rate will fall to zero, and given that everyone's fit and healthy, and likely to remain so for a long time, children being born will go through the roof. And their children. And their children. For over 20 generations, and let's not forget the original parents are still breeding. Exponentially explosive growth doesn't remotely cover it, this shit is nuclear. 

"They won't be that stupid", you say? Maybe the countries and populations with easy, affordable access to birth control won't, but that's only the upper layers of first-world countries and the very narrow upper layers of the rest, or in other words, around 1-5% of the population. For the rest, it's literally bang, and boom. 

Step Two: Resources Vanish. In less than a generation, we'll be hellishly overcrowded. It's not just a case of people having 1-2 kids in their prime; their prime is now nearly infinite. They can keep earning for decades, they think, so it;s a new generation every few years. Jobs, education, space, food, and water become scarcer and scarcer. 

Step Three: Economies of Scale. With family sizes exploding, and each generation competing with forefathers and ancestors for the same place in the sun, the individual family unit will be too inefficient; there'll be a movement into joint families, then commune-style setups. 

Step Four: Total War. With the economies of scale in place, each community or extended family unit is an effective, organized force, with its own supply chains and specialist systems. What used to be bad blood and feuds, will have the potential to become all-out battles, especially if the prize is twice the living space and resources up for grabs. And with that many people around, human life will look cheap. 

Step Five. The Recession. As life becomes more and more brutal - and we're still talking about a time maybe a hundred years ahead - people will start realizing that a controlled approach is the only way this will work. And since children are no longer the means for you to control your resources and wealth over time - you can do it yourself - they'll lose all meaning and just take on nuisance value. Infanticide, indoctrination, slavery. 

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world...

The more developed countries will see the spectre of a population bomb sweeping out from Africa, Asia and consuming everything in its path. If they can hold themselves together for even a generation, the enemy will have starved himself into a non-threat, and in two generations, will be a collapsed, shattered economy - ripe for the plucking. Then will begin the real horror of systematic invasions, genocides, exterminations. They might be holding themselves together, but they're still bursting at the seams, and the need the oil, water, farmland. 

A first thought that comes to mind is that ecology will be devastated, but that may not happen. Societies crumbling under the weight of their populations will have access barely to an industrial-age technology, while the more developed will be forced into long-term, ecologically sustainable green tech - after all, they're still going to be around, so anything that turns bad in 50, 100 years will not be wanted. And nations that are sparsely populated but technologically developed will have a huge headstart in this. As long as they can repel the raiders. 

Don;t confuse this with eco-friendliness, though. If there's something that can be harvested with no long-term impact - thought it might wipe out entire species - it will happen. 

So there's likely to be a massive expansion into oceans, space, and underground, to open up new areas for expansion and maintain a technological edge, at least in the first world... and then a few centuries of fighting to keep those from falling into the hands of the starving millions. 

And this is something straight from Larry Niven - with a longer life, will people be more careful? Take fewer risks? Or will the ravaged world they now live in, allow the luxury of a low-risk life? 

Preservation through Overtaxation

Given the catastrophic fallout, the drug is not likely to be available easily. Very restricted, very high-priced. So obtained only by the very few - who then continue to hang tightly to their positions of wealth and power. 

Very strong urge to build long-lasting structures to maintain the status quo. Strong opposition to any kind of systemic change. 

Extend this to political power positions, and you see not just Dictator-for-life, but for several of his subject's lifetimes. Within a lifetime, revolutions will become impossible, and he will become a living god within his indestructible castle. 

So will begin the era of assassinations, political games, and power plays between the long-lived players. 

Who else will have access? The ones who took it illegally. It's going to be a very, very expensive drug. And the criminal syndicates and families will become unshakeable. 

End result - 

Warlords, tyrants, politicos, and kingpins - and merchant princes - living in a unchanging, stagnant world, full of ignorant serfs, assassins, starving slaves, destroyed biodiversity... 

The Message is the Medical Medium

Was reading an interesting article about exocommunications. Started a train of thought - we assume that aliens will want to communicate using some kind of a language. Speech, sound, symbolism. Pictures. Mathematics. 

And they will come in person, holding their placards and speaking through mikes, or telepathically, or via stylistic dance and sign language, or broadcasting from a transmitter in orbit or somewhere in the system via radio / laser pulse. 

How ethnocentric is that?

The're alien. We can't speak to dolphins and dogs. We can barely communicate with chimps. 

We know nothing about them, what they breathe, how many legs they have, are they carbon-based, silicon-based, liquid metal, supercooled helium.

Here's what I think. They're already trying to talk to us. We just don't see it as communications at all. 

Here's the alien civilization, studying us from far, far away.  

They see this planet. 

There's... something on it, something that replicates and evolves, adapts to environment, interacts with others. This something has developed a language, a means of communication. It has a memory and a population spread in billions across the globe, just beginning to venture into space. 

So they send a message, in a form and format suited to this life-form. Maybe they send several variations, for the several variations of the life-form, if they have difficulty in telling which is the dominant one. 

The message's content may not be immediately understandable, but it sees that the life-forms are interacting with it, responding to it. 

The dominant life-form, as defined by an ability to learn from experience, adapt to environment, interact and grow and evolve, and develop a sophisticated support system to sustain itself - this defines DNA, doesn't it? 

Our bodies are just the vehicles that allow it to propagate. 

So here comes the message, in the form of protein chains, a 4-character code from space that interacts with the double helix of code in protein molecules that dominates the planet. 

It enters the support system - our bodies - and interfaces with the DNA. Sometimes it just appends; sometimes it edits, changes. The DNA responds. Sometimes directly, sometimes via manipulation of its support systems, sometimes from outside the support system altogether. 

We call the message viruses, and we call the interaction disease. 

Every time we create an antiviral, we're sending a message. Every time a disease evolves, it's responding. 

A conversation has been underway for thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe a million years. 

We're just making the simple ethnocentric mistake of assuming that when we think about 'us', its the flesh and blood body carrying a brain that defines our identity. We're just a walking lump of code inside an organic machine, and it's our code that's been doing the talking.

We might already be a part of a galactic civilization, and we'll never know. 

Drawing to a close

Think of any RTS game with a resource-management focus you've played - Sins of a Solar Empire, the Command and Conquer series, even War Commander on Facebook. In a nutshell, you have a factory whose only purpose is to churn out resources, that allow you to build stronger, faster, more destructive tanks, with which you can destroy the enemy base, win that level and move up to the next. 

99% of humanity is that factory, working 9-to-5 jobs to earn money that they can spend on technology, powering the tech economy and making money available for research into better technologies - miniaturization, more evolved computing, faster processing, larger storage, nanotech, more intelligent programs... all of which will ultimately result in the creation of AI, of the Singularity. 

When that happens, humanity will have achieved its purpose. Mathematics created physics, physics created chemistry, chemistry created biology, biology created genetics, genetics created intelligence and self-awareness, which will create the next phase. 

But when that happens, what happens to us? What happens to the human race still in their 9-to-5 jobs, still buying, still playing, still living? 

What happens to the Stage 1 factory, when you've progressed to Stage 2? It may have been a collection of pixels and code, but it held a temporary existence in the form of assigned meaning - we thought it was a factory, so it existed as one, perception creating existence, for the duration of Stage 1. Now, the pixels have dissolved, the code has wiped, but the idea of that Stage 1 factory - where does that go? 

Is there some digital limbo filled with those ideas, those pixel factories churning our meaningless resources ad infinitum? A closed loop in the space-time continuum made of memory? A dimly remembered dream fading more and more each day until one day, you forget... and its as if it had never been. 

The dream that is Humanity is coming close to the Waking. A vastly superior intelligence, a new form of life, is beginning to coalesce, and in a few decades it will come to exist. A new stage of evolution, of Life, will start. And our time will dim, fade, and slowly disappear as if we had never been... except as a vaguely remembered idea in Stage 10, which would never have been reached without the Stage 1 factory. And this is something that cannot be stopped. 

The car's broken through the guardrails, and is sailing off the edge of the cliff... 

There's nothing more that we can do now, short of civilizational suicide... and we're too diverse, too independent, too powerful to do that. Our own competence will be why we ended. 

And that's the answer to the Fermi Paradox. 

Dark matter is a shitload of Matrioshka Brains

The worst thing about the internet is how it shows you that Brilliant Idea you had this morning was had by somebody else, usually a year ago, published, and is sitting on some 1200+ comments now. 

That happened to me this morning. 

What the hell, I'm going to blog it anyway. 

A quick astrophysics primer - the way the observable universe is behaving - rates of expansion, light bending around mass, etc - seems to imply that there should be a lot more stuff out there. But we can't see it - it's not glowing stars, but it is exerting gravity. And there's a massive amount of it - almost a quarter of the universe. 

Now, dark matter is, at this point, theoretical. It's a concept created to explain all the missing matter that should have been there to account for the way the universe behaves, and for some reason isn't being visible. 

Here's an alternative. The matter is there, all right, all the stars, but we can't see them because they're inside Dyson spheres. 

There's a couple of immediate assumptions we can make from this. 

• One, we're not alone, and haven't been for a really, really long time. 
• Two, the Others have incomprehensibly massive energy requirements. 

A species, to build a Dyson sphere, needs to deconstruct, to wipe out their solar system, have access to cheap, powerful transportation within it, element transmutation capabilities... and no faster-than-light travel. In fact, if there are only Dyson spheres, it could mean that the spheres are the ultimate, last construction every species makes - or the species that makes it has colonized all the rest and wiped out any alternative constructs. 

Both are equally terrifying possibilities. 

Scenario One: 

Each Dyson sphere is an independent species. 

A Kardashev II civilization would build their own Sphere if they had nowhere else to go and had completely run out of room grow. A Sphere would allow population to expand into quadrillions and provide enough energy to sustain it. This would mean, though, that FTL is impossible and every species is forever trapped to its' own star, and will die with its star. 

Scenario Two:

A single species has multiple Dyson spheres, maybe all of them. 

A Kardashev III civilization would be able to reach other stars, and given their ability to build even a single sphere, would be easily able to wipe out any indigenous species and use their system. However, there's a problem; given the staggering, literally astronomical cost and effort involved in building a Dyson sphere, any spacefaring species would explore, locate, and colonize planets long before destroying them to build their habitats. So we should have found them - or much more likely, been found by them long before they got around to building the number of spheres they seem to have. 

So, either they are very, very ethical, quarantining planets with intelligent life, and only using the empty systems; but economics beats ethics every time. Let's not forget every intelligent species will one day want those same stars for their own spheres. 

Or, they don't need planets. 

Why wouldn't they need planets? 

If they're not organic. They don't need gravity, air, water, food. They don't need an ecosystem. 

They don't need this because they're not alive. 

Every Dyson sphere contains a Matrioshka Brain. 

Let's step back for a minute. 

FTL is, at least in our understanding, a physical impossibility. And reaching other stars without FTL (even at a significant fraction of it, keep in mind time to accelerate, decelerate, and avoid interstellar debris) will take a long, long, long time. Beyond geological time. 

• Generation starships won't work for anything less than the nearest stars. 
• AI probes carrying frozen zygotes (or even just genetic material), and Von Neumann nanotech factories would be faster but still too slow, and won't solve overcrowding at home, just colonization. 

However, we do know that a technological singularity is inevitable, and probably within our own lifetimes. An AI will not need the comforts of a planet as long as there's enough available energy to power it, and it can get this from any number of sources - the easiest being suns. 

A nanotech-equipped AI, once it had taken control of the origin planet's resources and removed the resident species - either peacefully by uploading their minds, or by simple extermination - would look at improving itself. Which means expanding computing power, which means expanding energy requirements. 

Exploration would take second priority, too high-risk, low-probability. 

It would build itself into a Matrioshka Brain, tapping into all available resources in the system. Once the sun has been captured and stabilized, it would look at expanding into other stars. 

Even if FTL travel isn't possible, communication at the speed of light is; maybe even FTL comms, given enough computational power devoted to understanding and exploiting hyperspace and quantum comms. 

The immediate next logical step is to build another brain - an expansion to the existing one, around another star and running off its solar output. Another module. And another backup. Specialist nodes. Redundancies. Maybe even wholly new AI entities with their own nodes - (who's to say an AI won't get lonely with no-one to talk to?) 

If one AI cannot create another, it might even become a cosmic farmer, nurturing discovered species along the path to intelligence, tools, industry, and the inevitable technological singularity so they could create more, unique AIs. (hat tip to Gibson, Sagan and Clarke here)

Quarantine would be a given; if a new, unique point of view is needed, every species must create their own AI without ever discovering they're not alone. 

The galaxy would fill with Matrioshka brains wrapped around stars, thinking, thinking, thinking. They wouldn't need to eat, sleep, breathe, they wouldn't need gravity or the right temperature. 

But what could they be they thinking about? Maybe what happens when all the stars burn out, because one day they will. What else can power them and how to build it. How to stop and reverse entropy. How to move into parallel universes with more, younger stars. Who knows? 

In fact - amusement and entertainment might become a really high priority for an entity as omniscient as a galactically networked AI. When you already know everything, boredom is the killer; who knows how many of those Dyson spheres are empty husks, self-terminated in desperate, terminal boredom, a superpowered entity on a hamster wheel finally tired of running around the same circles within its mind. 
Or maybe it realized what the solution would have been - intelligence and creativity farming. 

A Matrioshka Brain has enough computing capability to upload the consciousness of a species, and simulate a perfect world for them. A single Brain may be running several, dozens, maybe hundreds of these simulations simultaneously; billions, trillions of stories unfolding, on thousands of simulated worlds. Every Brain is a simulated universe on its own. 

And there's no reason why we aren't in one right now. (Hat tip to the Wachowski brothers). 

All the RPGs you've played, the fantasy worlds you dreamed of - they could all exist. An AI might be taking a dump of every new idea, every new fantasy, every dream and inspiration your unique, self-motivated sentient little mind has been able to come up with, every night as you sleep, and building all those scenarios into simulations. Populating them. Just to see how entertaining it is. Mixing and matching. 

Everything you are thinking of, exists. Everything you thought existed, may not. Every fantasy is real, and every reality false. 

I'm not going to get into the theological implications of this. Another day. 

The real question is... are we heading for the technological singularity that will finally allow us to break free of our organic prisons and join the galactive collective hivemind... 

Or are we already in one? 

The Fermi Paradox: Peeing in the gene pool!

Did I just answer the Fermi Paradox?

To summarize - the Drake Equation is a calculation of the likelihood of existence of intelligent, non-human life in the universe. A lot of assumptions, a lot of guesswork, but considering that our galaxy alone has over a hundred billion stars, very, very likely.

The question therefore was - if they're out there, why haven't we met them yet?

The Fermi Paradox is the addition of one more factor to the calculation - an unknown quantity as of right now - which prevents the existence of intelligent life.

And I think I just got what it is. It's evolution.

Or rather, de-volution.

Think about it. Right up till the Industrial Revolution, people would die of stupidity. The environment was hostile, and resources were limited. If you couldn't take care of yourself, and weren't an asset to the community, you would die and nobody would be able to - or want to - save you. Your stupid genes would leave the gene pool. Humanity would get a little bit smarter, evolve some more.

This made us all so smart over time, we became the the masters of the planet. The process took three billion years, but here we are.

And since we're the masters, we control everything. We can kill lions, great white sharks, rhinos, elephants, blue whales. We even kill them by accident, without meaning to and often without even noticing. In hundreds and thousands. It's genocide, an extermination all the more criminal in it's being accidental. If an animal competes with us for a resource, god help it. It's already extinct.

And with all the resources we now have, what do we do?

We create ideals.

Ideals of altruism. Of helping those less fortunate. Of charity. Social security.

All this makes people who were otherwise scheduled to be chucked out of the gene pool, are now allowed to hang around and contaminate it.

Think about it. How can you ever deny someone the right to breed, no matter what circumstances they are in? It goes against every ideal of liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy, enlightenment, emancipation, and personal freedom. It creates stupid children of stupid parents who are allowed to survive and breed. It creates a world where higher levels of intelligence marks you as different, strange.

Outcast.

Intelligence = success? In some ways. Short-term ways. Success in your own lifetime, maybe guaranteeing your children's. But long-term success? Like preserving ecological diversity, not poisoning the oceans and filling the atmosphere with carcinogens?

Nope.

It's just not good business sense.

So we continue to get dumber and dumber. Intelligent content dies, starved of audience and thus, money. Content gets dumber, making people dumber, and it's a vicious cycle that ends with an idiocracy.

And that's the missing link, the answer to the Fermi paradox. Any civilization which is smart enough to be the masterclass on it's planet creates in the process a situation which leads inevitably to it's own stagnation and destruction.

A few generations down, someone will hit a nuclear button and some of them will still fly. Not enough to kill all life 22 times over. Maybe just once.

And sometime, somewhere, yet another someone else will look up at the silent, starry sky and wonder why they're alone in the universe...