The Fermi Paradox: Interdiction

[@illusiveguy]

I really love space fortresses. Space fortresses surrounded by wastelands is such a good sci fi setting

[@SirHeinzbond]

i can't see it, when you bunker yourself i see only stagnation as it is like containing yourself to a singular pillow in your own house...

[@razorednight]

​@@SirHeinzbondA good science fiction setting isn't necessarily a good place to live. Great stories can emerge from the most hellish settings.

[@SirHeinzbond]

@@razorednight I agree, but not sure if stagnation and fortressing (if this is even a word...) are good Story points... For me a story means a movement from one point to another, if local, psychological or otherwise....there was a book series, Gibraltar Stars I think it was, but I disliked it, instantly... I don't want to read only positive stuff, but not to watch the characters to do the hedgehog...

[@imbarmstrong]

Whoever hides within their fortress loses the initiative in War. I can see that equally applying to civilisations on a whole losing their initiative and stagnating.

[@capefear56]

You would love Dune then

[@cannonfodder4376]

20:10 I can confirm that SFIA has done a number on my immersion with Sci-Fi. I can enjoy them but always have that knowledge that the scale and logic could often be better. A most wonderful and informative video to listen to while working. Makes the work enjoyable and time fly by. Great work, Isaac.

[@russc788]

I agree. Great videos and I don’t always agree with the logic either. Aliens might be as dumb as many of us are.

[@nekomakhea9440]

Rare Earths is definitely the most plausible Fermi Paradox solution. Thought Emporium tried growing mouse tissue in various sports drinks, and Vitamin Water was absolutely lethal, while a Japanese drink called Green Dakara worked nearly as well as professional biotech cell growth media, despite the two differing only slightly in the ratio of various ingredients. This shows how sensitive life is to minute differences in environmental conditions.

[@MrMirville]

Many earths can happen but only a tiny few can harbour life at times enabling mutual communication. And maybe there is a law that wherever an intelligent form of life can expand there cannot be another in its zone of access.

[@alpheuswoodley8435]

Fascinating

[@Yezpahr]

Scariest words ever spoken in the history and future of speech: "In a no-FTL universe..." **shivers**

[@ghostlyninja125]

isnt quantum tunneling FTL?

[@SirHeinzbond]

till we do know it is impossible, we can look for solutions to make it working...someone said once to me and tried to learn fly like a bird...

[@zrebbesh]

I don't have a problem with it. It's only SF literature that's got everybody expecting FTL. I think the way to get somewhere within a lifetime involves the much more achievable goal of longer lifetimes.

[@FlashRayLaser]

​@@ghostlyninja125 Sort of. It's more like bypassing the journey through spacetime than traveling faster than light through spacetime. While a very different thing, in effect itself, it's in this way similar to the idea of systematically bending spacetime both in front of and behind a craft to effectively "move" the bubble of spacetime the craft inhabits itself at a (hopefully) unlimited speed rather than accelerating it through the actual fabric of spacetime at any speed at all. It may be that while c (the speed of light) cannot be exceeded, the need to exceed it can often simply be creatively bypassed. The biggest trouble in my opinion is that c isn't really the speed of light; it's the speed of causality. Even if the universe isn't a simulation, you can think of c as almost exactly analogous to the processor speed of the "computer" that is the universe. Software, no matter how clever, can do very little to end in the execution of calculations faster than the processor could typically handle. Software efficiency maximization in this case is analogous to whatever methods we might devise to bypass c. c will absolutely never be exceeded, but whether or not it can be bypassed will ultimately be determined by if the actions we use and the near instantaneous transfer of information non-locally can be done in any sort of way that doesn't still end up straining the "processor" beyond function in some other way. The fact that quantum entanglement doesn't seem to "actually" transmit information faster than c and that newly discovered gravitational waves seem to obey c aren't looking good at all. Sadly, it genuinely looks a lot like the sort of thing we can preemptively declare to be impossible, like a mathematical fallacy almost, with no regard for how utterly magical and incomprehensible the rest of our tech may eventually get. That said, I can't help but notice we once said things like this about flight. I'm part of the Rubik's cube speed solving community and I can't help but notice the history of predictions of lowering the best possible average solve time since the 80s very much reflects a phenomenon in scientific progress between newer dreamers pointing out the impossible is always made possible and veterans saying, "Yeah but sadly it's actually different this time. We really do know no better now. We weren't as knowledgeable in the past." When we first got under 10 seconds, people said it was the human limit. When we got to 9 most of the best in the world said okay for real this time. Then 8. Then 7. But from there veterans in the community itself said 6 was impossible but explained how they actually know for sure this time, with analysis of the best algorithms, proofs of fewest theoretical required moves coupled with human finger speed limitations, etc. They had to be right. I mean all the facts checked out. But newer people to the hobby were always still more hopeful and said things like, "While I see the apparent mathematical problems here and respect that, as a believer in math I ALSO have to think about the field of statistics and that we're wrong 100% of the time when we declare a limit for over 30 years now." It went to 6. Then 5. Okay, sure, how did they miss that possibility through all the new techniques, but now people just need to understand that was a one-off and we fluked, 4 obviously is physically impossible for real. It went to 4. It went to 3. It went to 2. Now the question is seriously whether or not someone could someday actually solve a Rubik's cube in one second on average. One second. Sounds kinda crazy like someone outrunning a car, but I honestly don't know what to think anymore. We feel like this every single time and every single time it somehow still feels right to say "okay but we know better now" even though that's exactly what we thought every single time. Why is now statistically likely to be different? It's not. My position is an uncomfortable one in that I feel I could (sadly) almost bet my very life c will never be exceeded given the current evidence, but then there's the nagging history of being wrong. It also feels a lot like I seemingly caught my wife in bed with someone else, saw it with my own two eyes, got it on camera, there were 10 witnesses, she says it didn't happen, I would seemingly be insane to believe her, but I have a history of having falsely accused her 100 times, each time feeling that sure. What do you do with that? That's the situation we're in with c.

[@istvanvincze7411]

@@zrebbesh It does mean however that we will never, ever be able to visit anything outside the local group, which, considering the mind boggling size of the entire universe, means we will only ever be able to live on a speck comparatively. To one up OP, I would even dare to say the scariest words ever spoken would be "In a no-FTL universe, doomed to heat death...". It means after a few trillion years our civilization will either have to live around a black hole or die from starvation, only delaying the inevitable. That is genuinely scary for most people, including me.

[@Kallistos1]

Interdiction and Cronus hypothesis reminds me of the actual solution arrived at by Asturias and Byzantium. Asturias depopulated the Duoro valley, making a "desert" between them and Al Andalus, to remove raiding targets and a scorched earth buffer raiders had difficulty finding resources to cross. This was maintained for centuries. Byzantium and the Caliphate had a mostly depopulated buffer zone between the Taurus mountains for a similar reason. An interesting consideration. Also hot headed frontiersmen starting wars wit neighbors, dragging in the Metropole, also happened fairly often on the US frontier.

[@continentalgin]

Simply observing nature on Earth tells us that every species viciously fights for food and survival. We can't expect nature anywhere in the universe to be any different. So, of course, it's a hostile universe.

[@continentalgin]

@@shatteredteethofgod The chances of you being correct are next to nothing.

[@josephbolton5893]

@@shatteredteethofgod And you have even less grounds for your supposition that it does vary that widely. We just won't know until we get out there.

[@boobah5643]

@@shatteredteethofgod No grounds except that the universe _appears_ to all function under the same rules. The properties of life are emergent from those. The question of sentients being implacably hostile to each other has more to do with their views on the value of cooperation versus the dangers of hostility, which seems much more variable than successful, mindless life expanding to the full extent that it can.

[@johnassal5838]

@@continentalgin The longer it takes to get anywhere the less likely a hostile race would encounter any rivals or victims before turning on themselves. The same argument may apply to civilizations ripping themselves apart before any grand engineering like Dyson Spheres visible from outside their galaxy can be completed. Imo whatever the reality is must involve a lot more skulking and hiding than conquest to account for what we do and don't see. While you could never be sure you aren't entirely visible to some civilization that was watching since before yours had fire it's reasonably clear that if anyone was watching they obviously didn't destroy you and so probably have other priorities. It seems increasingly likely to me that the classic urge to unrestrained expansion must itself be a Great Filter and eliminated for a civilization to survive long enough for non FTL colonization to reach anywhere or for that matter for any FTL to pan out, in either case thereafter resulting in a much lighter and more spread out footprint than most colonization scenarios assume. So even if some arbitrarily fast FTL later becomes available making travel to the farthest galaxies practical, the large majority of civilizations may logically choose to not aggressively overbuild or to ever tolerate it.

[@cyanyde6724]

Wow, I can't believe how good you sound here! You've come a LONG way.. You have almost no impediment. Congrats on all your hard work. YOU SOUND GREAT!!! :D Thanks for yet another awesome video.

[@Kallistos1]

Indeed there's not even a slight accent. He responded quickly to speech therapy

[@adambrain8365]

A good doctor can nail it while others take good guesses. If a doctor tells you there is no fix. Seek a new opinion. He had exercises to do too, and obviously he has been working on that with vigor. I do love to see how far his audio has come, that rascally rabbit.

[@nicolasolton]

IA is the King of the KZbin.

[@TheRoadLessChosen]

🙄

[@MattHanr]

I remember the “hey wascally wabbits, turn on subtitles if you need it” message. Come a long way. if you need an exercise word that’s relevant to the channel you can practice with “Terraformable Worlds” ❤

[@ArawnOfAnnwn]

The portion around 16 mins reminds me of the online short story Three Worlds Collide, which is precisely about the confrontation between 3 alien cultures with utterly incompatible value systems. The author even doesn't bother giving them a real-sounding name, instead just naming the other two cultures by way of said contrasting values. As you'd expect the only solution found for the situation is effectively disengagement. The alternative - the 'bad' ending - is basically complete assimilation by the most powerful species.

[@wolvenar]

Unfortunately, assimilated or not, they will eventually resplit as the local conditions will inevitability craft the differences between them.

[@brianzmek7272]

That story has FTL

[@BeyondAldebaran]

Cool story. It’s on the HPMOR podcast in audio format too.

[@henryaudobooks9678]

See I liked the “bad ending “way better everyone learns to get along we get to keep art and culture and we all transcend into a brave new era together. The true ending is just depressing where it turns out yeah no more pieces of shit who can’t evolve so we end up nuking our only chance of trying something new and beautiful because we’re scared and clinging on the past.

[@ArawnOfAnnwn]

@@henryaudobooks9678 Out of curiosity, does the doomsday scenario of a rogue AI seeking to fulfill its directive of making all humans happy by restraining us (or turning us all into just brains in a vat) and pumping us full of euphoric drugs constantly not sound all that bad to you? Granted in the 'bad' ending of Three Worlds' Collide we're still mobile and 'free' after being changed, but it's still implied we've basically lost ourselves from it

[@casnimot]

I also favor the rare complexity explanation, in tandem with time and the speed of light. We haven't been broadcasting two centuries yet, and haven't yet been writing for 10k years, by most accounts. Even 25kly radius is just this quadrant of the galaxy. If a galaxy of this middling size were only expected to see 1 or 2 such as us, spread out over 100k years, we could miss them for millennia to come. Worse, our nearest galactic neighbor is only visible as it was a couple million years ago. Might completely miss them too. It could be much more a 'needle/haystack' situation than people think.

[@Lusa_Iceheart]

It's like finding the needle in a haystack that is itself in a pile of haystacks inside a barn that is part of an entire state covered entirely in the exact same red-with-white-trim barns. We still have a LOT of places to check and we might be an interstellar civilization by the time we finally find the needle... only to find out the needle was made of plastic and that's why we couldn't find the damn thing with our metal detectors.

[@PointyHairedJedi]

It amuses me no end that it might legitimately be that an alien civilisation looks at us and goes "Nuh uh, waaay too horny, you just stay over there. We've seen your internet..."

[@murderedcarrot9684]

Buffer zone full of smuggler bases where hammerheads smuggle rum into Lithgowian space.

[@tomfuller4205]

I once lived in Arizona next to some very unfriendly neighbors and our properties were separated by a 10 wide strip owned by a third party. While there was a split rail fence on my side there wasn’t on the other’s. Not for lack of trying, they put up all manner of fences and barriers midway down the strip, which the previous owners and myself referred to as the Neutral Zone. Those barriers seemed to always be removed when I was at work. The neighbor would have a cow and scream and yell at me and mine so finally an eight foot chainlink fence went up on that property line and I never saw or heard from that neighbor again.

[@pyroromancer]

Ideals and varying levels of wealth are the biggest source of conflict on our little Earth. We are highly social animals, while skin color and language may cause shallow altercations, ultimately they are rarely the sole source of conflict. if we encounter an extraterrestrial civilization they will likely come to convert us to adopt and believe in their ways or face extermination.

[@CMAzeriah]

​@@pyroromancerKhorne cares not from whence the blood flows. Only that it flows.

[@xBINARYGODx]

@@pyroromancer sorry, but you are way off on the skin color thing - it has verry much has an effect on how some groups get treated vs others when the conditions are otherwise the same or ultra similar or simply similar enough.

[@thomashiggins9320]

@@xBINARYGODx I disagree. The ultimate causes of war are perceptions of shortages, or the notion that some economic advantage is worth the blood and expense. Issues such as religion motivate troops to fight, but have little to do with why governments initiate war in the first place. Even the "peculiar institution," the consequence of which continue to plague us in the United States, started out as a way to gain economic advantage through the exploitation of the labor of others. When labor-intensive extraction or farming of high-demand commodities offer a couple of the *very few* means to reliably live more prosperously, then exploitation of labor absolutely will occur. Skin-color is nothing more than a easy way to distinguish between the exploiter and the exploited.

[@ThatGhostsHost]

@@pyroromancer Extermination is a really bad look and they might face consequence’s. I’d imagine permission would be needed by many to even contact us and with conversion being a choice.(on top of many assumptions)

[@st3venseagal248]

The Algebraist is one of my favorite Iain M Banks novels, might even be one of my favorite scifi novels itself.

[@MidwitObservations]

Ian was the best 👌

[@joskeguereza3714]

the Dwellers as a species are simply hilarious

[@razorednight]

​@@joskeguereza3714I love it when that guy who invaded the system tries to threaten them...

[@christophe5756]

This was a good one. This one “sounded right” to me. This is my third time watching this one, but I’m going to scrub back to where “Red Giant” by Stellardrone started and watch that part again. 😎👍🏽👍🏽

[@jackalope839]

Good fences make good neigbors is from a poem about how much the author enjoys spending a day per year fixing a rather shoddy fence with his neigbor. Just saying.

[@coyoteblue4027]

Yeah and "blood is thicker tham water" in its original context has the opposite meaning of how people generally use it now. Get over it.

[@Truth_Teller_101]

@@coyoteblue4027 This isn't the same thing. First of all, Frost would be appalled to have the meaning of his poem mangled, and the "content creator" of a channel who purports to be some sort of science guru should know better.

[@coyoteblue4027]

@@Truth_Teller_101 the fuck does robert frost have to do with astrophysics? Why would you expect IA to be an expert in stuffy late victorian poetry? Get a grip. Also, it is exactly the same. An author wrote a thing. It entered into popular usage with a meaning that is diametrical to its original meaning. Logically identical situations. And robert frost is dead. No one gives a shit what he thinks of his poems, because he doesn't think anything about anyrhing, because he is dead.

[@thesilentgod7863]

@coyoteblue4027 you didn’t have to seethe this hard lmao 😂

[@coyoteblue4027]

@@thesilentgod7863 they're the one who was seething. I just told them what's what.

[@wolvenar]

The Fermi Paradox is probably something along the lines that there's so many things going against colonization of a galaxy versus going for it, that it's just really, really hard to happen.

[@leonardpearlman4017]

AAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaand: There's not much to see, what there IS to see is VERY far away, we don't quite know what we're looking for, and if we DID we might be a little out-of-phase with it, aliens are remarking on it being a slow eon lately.... Our local group might be a little bit of a backwater, and best of all: Maybe NOBODY NOWHERE NEVER has yet gone faster than light, or even anything LIKE the Speed O' Light, which I see no reason at all to think is going to happen, or has ever happened! That doesn't prove anything! BUT NEITHER does one's sci-fi-driven feeling that it SURELY MUST be possible, because we seen it in Star Wars! I personally believe that the Alleged Paradox is the food of idiots, and only exciting and compelling to persons who can't tell Science-Fiction from Science. You're all talking nonsense as far as I can tell! That being said, the videos are very striking and compelling.

[@mchevre]

@@shatteredteethofgod I'm pretty sure they were just offering their opinion on what they think the solution to the paradox is, and just used imprecise wording.

[@kurtswanson6950]

I am reminded of a short story I have ready: an astronomer gets a coded message from an alien source. He decodes it, and it says "BE QUIET OR THEY WILL HEAR YOU."

[@ohioplayer-bl9em]

That would be scary AF 😮

[@brunocesarcerqueira2525]

Cool

[@SONNENKVLT]

There was a similar ending for the game "Voices of the Void"

[@dundeedolphin]

Three body problem?

[@invaliduser6431]

Simpsons did it. /s

[@adamwu4565]

One issue with aliens being isolationist like this as a Fermi Paradox solution is that even if they limit themselves all to just their own home star system, there's no reason at least some of them wouldn't build up that home system with a Dyson Swarm and other megastructures, and we'd still be able to see that from Earth, if there are any of them within the Local Group.

[@isaacarthurSFIA]

Kinda, we would easily miss an isolated dyson right now, not because its stealthy but just because it doesn't really stick out unless you are looking at it. Anything inside a thousand light years, yes we'd spot that, beyond that, it would depend a lot on if someone examining infrared data did a double-take on it, so to speak. It's big collection of millions of them that we couldn't miss. In a few decades, with AI able to look through everything for little anomalies like that and our IR detection getting better, yeah, we'd see it, but there's could be hundreds of them scattered around our galaxy by themselves or in small groups and we could miss that.

[@saucevc8353]

@@isaacarthurSFIA Idk if advanced civilizations would need buffer zones more than thousand light years large. That's a lot of resources to deny oneself just to be 100% sure you aren't gonna start a war. If we truly are in an interdiction zone and the empires involved are willing to leave so much empty space as a buffer, they would probably be very large empires to which the resources in that space are miniscule and would need a large buffer so that news of mistakes can reach the capitol in time. But empires that large would probably be very detectable as well.

[@DominikPlaylists]

@@isaacarthurSFIA one big hole is some of the reasoning I heard on a lot of videos is that zoo hypothesis (and a few related) is unfalsifiable and therefore not scientific. A lot of zoo hypothesis can be broken into scientific falsifiable subsets, namely there is a civilization on planet ABC or megastructure XYZ and that civilization is doing zoo hypothesis on us. Once we can check all anomalies with AI and future large scale surveys we can falsify all of them. It does not falsify all of zoo hypothesis, but it does falsify the most plausible versions of zoo hypothesis.

[@NeostormXLMAX]

@@isaacarthurSFIA its bold of people to assume aliens would even need energy like humans, have you considered alternative power systems? like a fungi microprocesser that has been found to be in development? or organic spaceships? i doubt they would need a dysonsphere etc

[@ivoryas1696]

​@@NeostormXLMAX I mean, that's fascinating... but it's _also_ a far, _far, _*_far,_* less potent, and therefore the fact that they'd skip out on something _that much_ more powerful using technology that _really_ isn't *_that_* much less advanced (see low-tech K-2 civilizations) violates non-exclusivity.

[@Dinismo]

Part of what i love about this channel is the animations and imagery. Been subbed for a long time!

[@placeholdername0000]

With cataclysmic weapons, that make Tsar bomba look like a firecracker, being available to anyone with a decent sized space station, this makes sense. Uranium enrichment with centrifuges should be quite easy in the vacuum of space. No need for superior bearings, when you are in zero G, you can just have some thrusters spin up the spacecraft. And with 100 au between you and any other ship, uranium mining will hardly be detected, nor be suspicious if it is, given the need for energy in deep space. That gives people an incentive to get away from it all. If your planet has 50 billion, it will be a much more attractive target than if it only has half a billion. Therefore, people spread out, leading them to be more quiet. No dyson spheres, at least only rarely, but just a bunch of quiet, grabby alien civilization. Each armed to the teeth with doomsday devices.

[@hherpdderp]

A combo of this and the dark forest sounds like a plausible nightmare universe.

[@macfine]

Personally I just think expansion is more difficult to sustain than it is given credit for and the rates of complete expansion are woefully optimistic

[@4circuit]

I love the new graphics. Thanks.

[@Entity8473]

If getting to 10% lightspeed or greater is extremely difficult and nearly space faring civilizations go to ideal candidate star systems. There is a chance that successful colonizing another star system is like winning the lottery 100 times consecutively in a week with no losses. The longer a journey takes, the greater the chances of something going wrong becomes.

[@gumby2ms]

yeah the assumption on getting close to lightspeed i find laughable. 1% seems dangerous imo. so then you'd have to catch a ride on a brown dwarf or rogue planet beyond the oort, terraform it, and spread via osmosis. that and rare earth (modified to rare sun) explains everything fine. plus metallicity and galactic habitable zones makes it likely we are too soon in our galaxies age to determine if late filters also exist

[@cognitivedissidents4642]

Given the timescales for evolution I would think contact between species would be more like Black Monoliths and Proto-humans than the United Federation Of Planets.

[@piotrd.4850]

To be honest: UFP held small size of galaxy, had only FTL capable members to start with and was *very* sparsely populated.

[@pyroromancer]

Anime plot where the entire galaxy was wiped clean at the end of an intercivilization war and we are the surviving descendants of one of those civilization. I saw an anime a long time ago, I forgot the name, but they were playing with the theme that every black hole are a site where a mega weapon was used to destroy entire planetary systems as a result of M.A.D. interaction between civilizations.

[@interstellarsurfer]

Big Gurren Lagann Energy. 👍

[@ArawnOfAnnwn]

@@interstellarsurfer Eww. I hated Gurren Lagaan. :/

[@FRODOGOOFBALL]

Gall Force

[@sequoyahrice6966]

@@ArawnOfAnnwn bad taste

[@pyroromancer]

​​​@@FRODOGOOFBALL"...THEY USED THE PLANET KILLERS... all our home worlds were destroyed..."

[@MichaelDerryGameitect]

There's a big potential issue with the _long-term_ viability of buffer zones: *stellar drift.* Stars closer to the center of the galaxy generally orbit faster than those further out so any cluster of a million star systems will stretch out and be pulled apart over time. It's not completely straightforward, as nearby stars have basically random motion due to variations in orbital speed and eccentricity, but any roughly spherical cluster would probably be pretty well scattered within 50 million years.

[@nicolasolton]

Isn't the dark matter hypothesis based on the fact that stars in the outer galaxy orbit at the same speeds generally as those close to the center?

[@vakusdrake3224]

There's some additional obvious issues here you didn't mention, but have mostly mentioned in other episodes: Firstly for this solution to really work you have to assume all of these civilizations deliberately chose to not pursue certain tech or somehow haven't maxed out their tech yet. Since if the home system has already maxed out their tech and can safely make self replicators and AI, then they will have such a massive head start that their colonies can't threaten them unless the home system stopped growing for a really long time to allow the colony to catch up to them. Plus if they have AI they can make really damn sure that that AI is extremely stable first and predictable in its benevolent goals, then require any colony ships bring along a copy of that AI to both massively aid their efforts, while also keeping an eye on things and being smart enough to foresee issues in advance and preemptively avoid them. Even if you take for granted the need to suppress certain dangerous technologies; this also assumes they don't utilize any of the combinations of technologies which can eliminate any risk from their colonies. For instance ageless authoritarian societies with sufficient levels of surveillance can avoid these issues, as can egalitarian cultures if they are good at predicting human behavior and simply require brain scans and certain behavioral conditioning (all done in a totally above board transparent manner) be accepted by any would be colonists before they're allowed to leave the system with certain tech/knowledge. There's also the non-exclusivity problem that even if 1 civilization gets the chance to wipe itself out with AI, or a dumb hegemonizing swarm: that probably leads to observable consequences as that AI or Von-Neuman swarm expands fairly quickly.

[@iangardner777]

I almost didn't subscribe last video. Then you say space civilizations need math and I'm like, wait a second, that's not "necessarily" true. 10 seconds later you say the same and also this: "So while it is good to have rational assumptions, it always pays to remember that the universe is large enough to have a good laugh at us and our assumptions, too." I'm hooked! So happy I did subscribe. 😊

[@dariustiapula]

Social distancing at an interstellar level. As humans lets screw that up. Gotta make friends and get soft tacos later.

[@jsbrads1]

Not social distancing, but I had an idea of aliens very freewheeling when it comes to trade, war, piracy and colonizing any system… except for one, the home system of any life.

[@yaelz6043]

If they've made it to space they probably aren't dumb enough to make friends with people who have invaded literally all other nations on their planet and butchered 4 billion humans. Nor are they likely to be swayed by your indignation, propaganda and bipolar disorder.

[@TGBurgerGaming]

The idea that every single being in the galaxy could adhere to that with no deviations would suggest they are all in fact machines.

[@jsbrads1]

@@TGBurgerGaming the few that don’t follow would find repulsive fields that curtail them on all sides. The gaps between tree canopies comes to mind, a single tree doesn’t break it because there is no benefit and lots of down side to breaking the norms.

[@TGBurgerGaming]

​@@jsbrads1 again that assumes everyone is going to agree to that. If for example i wanted to bring down your barrier generator i would dump rubbish that accidentally hits your barrier generator. Woops. Oh, well might as well corner the market while I'm here. 🤑🤑🤑

[@thorin1045]

the trek concept still can work. most of the time they did not leave the federation, just explore the inner parts of it. like if everyone agreed to keep on their own continent in the early nineteenth century, but africa and asia and even the american ones could very easily boldly go to their neighboring village as almost unknown territory.

[@WilliamSlayer]

I really really hope that we are just the early civilization and that we can leave markers for future civilizations to follow Into the stars!

[@wise_guy4230]

You had some great mech photos in this video. Thank you for sharing both videos and the imagery. Its some good intellectual inspiration. I've been rather sick, all week, and needed a creative boost.

[@LaserGuidedLoogie]

I think we have some bias here, to think of "space empires" as some static defense network, like we have on Earth. But everything in space is moving continuously , relative to each other, and you can't just "carve out a bubble" around you, since that "bubble" would be continously changing and misformed. Unless you would just create an interdiction radius from your home system, and declare that any star system that wanders into that radius is now fair game for depletion and exploitation. Seems like this would start more wars than prevent them.

[@casnimot]

By the way: Gaming would be one way we could interact with any species, but again, the speed of light is a real problem (or solution, depending on disposition).

[@CharliMorganMusic]

I think that the filter is probably somewhere in the middle, between the development of multi-cellular life and that life making the leap to sapiance.

[@blinkonceonsunday1325]

I think if we actually encountered an alien civilization, we might choose caution. Simply avoiding contact might be a better policy. Trying to contact them directly might lead to trouble. Traveling several light years to claim some resources that are likely readily available in our own solar system is probably going to be very counter-productive. Attempting to conquer an alien species for those resources, even more so. Those alien species probably feel the same way. I think they might find habitable worlds near their home system that don't contain intelligent life and start some colonies, but a dozen or so colony worlds is probably the limit that they could reasonably sustain.

[@RoofAndAMeal4UsAll]

Enjoy life in its every moment for this is all far more fragile than appearances, and our sense of normalcy, might suggest. We may never pass this way again, Earth is ever in the same place twice, nothing ever is as our sun and solar system, asteroids etc. hurtle in our arc around the disc of the milky way. Who knows what lies in store for spaceship Earth, we don't know what we're doing & certainly have no idea where we're headed. Lets hope it is a lasting experience for humanity. 🌎

[@xBINARYGODx]

That's an impressive number of useless platitudes shoved into one short paragraph. Unironic bravo.

[@jesseberg3271]

Ok, that's not what, "Good fences make good neighbors" means. Frost was a New Englander, and he was talking about stone walls along property lines, that would be damaged in the spring when the snows melted. To fix them, you and your neighbor would walk the length of your shared fence, working together to repair any damaged sections. It was the act of cooperatively maintaining your fences which made you good neighbors, by ensuring that you could work together. In this context, for the quote to make sense, it would have to be arguing that the act of mutually patrolling those boarders actually brought the two civilizations together and built trust and respect. It would work in a sort of Star Trek, "We are not so different, you and I..." sense. But that isn't the point of the episode, making the quote sort of inappropriate.

[@MichaelDerryGameitect]

I think many (most?) people don't know about that original meaning anymore. The sense of 'you stay on your side, I'll stay on mine' seems to have taken over, so it's not really inappropriate under _that_ usage. Thank you for the information, though.

[@Truth_Teller_101]

It's like the phrase "They were decimated..." now meaning completely destroyed. In Latin in the context of the Romans it meant "1 in 10" and was used as a type of punishment to keep regiments in line.

[@MichaelDerryGameitect]

@@Truth_Teller_101 Yeah, I think of the how the original definition _drastically_ changes from the intended meaning whenever that one comes up. _'Only _*_decimated?_*_ That's not so bad, then.'_

[@sab1751]

The more you know

[@GrigoriZhukov]

Thank you for the reminder.

[@Sp3rw3r]

One day a space buoy will be found. Declaring a huge hazard zone around Sol. * warning extreme danger of culture cracking: they have internet * On second thought, maybe we should place one ourselves. Do we really want aliens to lean the concept of cat videos?

[@allnamestakenisnot]

We should save the wider universe from our melodrama lol.

[@keithharper32]

what if they were monitoring our social media studying us getting ready to contact us. And then they saw Twitter now a full quarantine is strictly enforced

[@Reclusiarch_jakal]

Now I want you to read Captain Ginger , a comic where we all died out and our cats inherited a starship. Plus they mutated in intelligent humanoids

[@nhoulstono7612]

@@keithharper32 if they read twitter now they know, to not mess around with the ones made in gods shape!!!

[@TheKotaCan]

thank you for another amazing topic!

[@markusmencke8059]

Maybe we don’t detect those beacons because *they* haven’t seen *us* yet? Broadcasting 24/7/365 and in a full sphere is costly energy- and resource-wise. Tight-beaming after detection should be easier. And civilisations on that level may have us under telescope surveillance anyway, so they can see when we get to (or, can be projected to reach) a level where sending that information may become a necessity.

[@Truth_Teller_101]

Nobody is sending signals that take thousands or hundreds of thousands of years to reach their destination. Entire species get wiped out or evolve into new species in such time frames.

[@MidwitObservations]

Love you Isaac! Love you SFIA. And Love you fellow Arthur enjoyers!

[@joesmith1142]

If there are many civilizations out there. My feeling is that, one other possible reason they avoid making contact with us simply because we dont live long enough as individuals to make any meaningful impactful relationships. I think when we crack the aging code and can live centuries as individuals, we might then see an introduction from another alien species or civilization. The average intellectual adult that lives to be 80+ years old is maybe just barely beginning to gain a truly mature wisdom, and then they die with no real possibility of passing on that wisdom to a younger mind, because a younger mind can only really gain it though experience and time. This is why our civilization is constantly in a state of chaos and disorder. Basically children are always in control. I dont mean to belittle our species, its just our current state of biology, just point out another possible reason.

[@gusenglezos5802]

An even bigger flaw, I believe, is that the bubble of stars will not look like a bubble for long and the colonies of other bordering civilizations would eventually mix. You would need to relocate X people and infrastructure every Y intervals in perpetuity to keep to this set-up.

[@Sumoniggro]

The buffer zones makes perfect sense because we as a species with our different civilizations can't even get along with each other so the idea that extraterrestrial species would understand conflict if not between themselves than between them and other species from their home planet, if the evolutionary arms race is a universal phenomenon than at the very least interspecies conflict would be something they understand fully and would be a motivator in their defensive behavior.

[@nicolasolton]

Damn it would be so cool to see what humanity can accomplish if given the opportunity to continue scientific advances for another 500-1000 years.

[@RobbieRoach-u7l]

Might be my favorite part of this series

[@maxm3522]

45 minute SFIA fermi paradox video??? THANK YOU LORD

[@larrye.goinesjr.1535]

The Star Trek Warp Drive Was Invented To Flashforward To Events Which In Reality, Captain Kirk's Grandchildren's, Grandchildren's Grandchildren Would Only Be Around To Experience?!?

[@StarboyXL9]

"cosmic evolution might have a penchant for the simple life over the drama of higher intelligence!" Cosmic Evolution is so based for that honestly.

[@lengould9262]

The "Fermi Paradox" question demands a deeply thought-through answer to 1) q. what will humanity be like in 10,000 years into the future? a. with no rational need for large populations, and no added profit to gain from them, where will humans then decide to stabilize human population? 2) q. will THAT [eg q 1] size of population leave a detectable signature on their star system? a. Unlikely. Pollution of any sort will be barbaric. They will have ways to maintain any needed temperature, move themselves or any object, etc without any change to the environmental conditions which evolved them. 3) q. Does evolving near a red dwarf star seriously change the indicaters of life we could detect? [etc etc]

[@emmettobrian1874]

Fermi paradox solution, rare differentiation. Life on Earth is unusual in that life started out as a competition. In most other planets, life cooperates as a default and never differentiates. Life is almost always one of a few mega creatures. If most intelligent life masses over 100 tons, and more often in the gigaton range, it would be really hard to ever leave your world. The only thing this doesn't completely fix is the lack of signals from those mega creatures. It might mean that language is novel though. If a world is basically one creature, there's no reason to have ever developed language and therefore communication.

[@e-moshe]

I like to think the early history of the BattleTech fictional universe also gives an example of how problematic colonies can be and feeds into these Fermi Paradox issues. In that scenario the universe was also simplified to completely exclude aliens and technological collapse still occurred while enormous genocides also became common. And this was just a fiction to set up a game.

[@lonjohnson5161]

Borders in space can exist for hundreds or thousands of years, but not millions, at least not easily. Everything in the night sky is moving. Eventually, your favorite colony will drift into the desert zone and you are faced with an ugly choice. This could be a possible basis for a scifi story.

[@cosmictreason2242]

Hmmm pretty good point tbh

[@Lusa_Iceheart]

I mean, not really if all your core systems in your "officially inhabited zone" are built up enough. You could do stuff like make a shakadov thruster made of the dyson swarm around the star, control the direction the star travels and thereby keep your systems traveling 'in formation'. Or even create artificial black holes to use as local barycenter's of gravity that would 'naturally' keep the stars in a rough grouping, moving together. Your 'desert zone' around the fortress region would move, but that might be seen as preferable since you can then pillage these new stars that you "pass by" and strip mine those too. So you're "buffer zone" would be a sort of streak across the galaxy not too unlike a comet and it's cometary tail. Hell, we might already be seeing this in the form of some of the globular clusters within the galaxy. The "Metal poor" stars in these old systems might simply just have been star-lifted, and the civilization that inhabits the cluster dumps most of this extra mass it's not using into black holes for long term, late universe storage. We take for granted that things like globular clusters are simply natural and base a lot of our understanding of the universe around these assumptions. If any one of these "natural" features of a galaxy like the milky way isn't natural, it'd rewrite a lot of astronomy.

[@dainramis7332]

I like this one. It seems natural given what I understand. Space travel is hard and you can only go so far effectively

[@user-jap84tlv24sq]

It makes sense for me that individualistic civilizations would have a some part of population being space hermits.

[@JohnandTeagan]

What does this look like given the movement of stars? How long would you expect a given star within a 100 light year bubble to remain within that bubble?

[@michaelstreeter3125]

@Isaac you should do an episode on the Ruliad: the universe is filled with intelligence but it is different enough from the way we think that we simply can't understand it and look straight past it.

[@Intelligenthumour]

I think a big potential flaw for this idea is long distance colony ships. You purposefully send an inert(as in for whatever reason it can only colonize its target location, be it by automation or some other means) colony ship well beyond your interdiction zone and well beyond a range where they may be a threat to you. Preferably having some other civilization between the two of you and going for a slow and stealthy approach. Sneaky colonies to spread out your kind and to encapsulate another civilization would be a strategy that would lead to those interdiction zones shrinking over time if it ever took off(and if stealth is the approach then rogue elements could perpetrate it) and you inevitably get a more and more populated galaxy or one riddled with war which would all be loud and obvious in the night's sky.

[@DanielSmith-q3w]

There is no such think as too far away to threaten you unless you are going a lot farther than anywhere in the galaxy.

[@Intelligenthumour]

@@DanielSmith-q3w True, but it's a matter of priority for the supposed colony. In terms of proximity, your rival civilization is closer to the colony than you are and thus both of them are primarily focused on one another. The rival civilization could strike out against you in retaliation, but that's a conflict that's much harder for them to deal with than the smaller, closer threat(the colony). It's also harder for them to definitively say that it was an intentional measure against them since the colony ship would be aiming to be as stealthy as physically possible. In all likelihood it very well may come from rogue elements if it is in this form and that ambiguity makes justifying all out war harder.

[@DanielSmith-q3w]

@@Intelligenthumour I responded and my response vanished¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I said, we are less than 150 population doubling away from turning every atom of our Hubble volume into humans (if that were possible). So I think any sane species would see *any* extra-system colonization as a threat to conquer the whole galaxy soonish (rightly) and want to gang up and respond with the minimum force necessary to make sure the colonizers home planet got the message and stopped colonizing forever. It's like how you should put out the mouse traps as soon as you hear a mouse, not wait till they are scurrying around everywhere. Minimum force necessary to avoid unavoidable retaliation.

[@djschultz1970]

Future episode idea. Grey Goo as Fermi-Paradox solution. Any sufficiently advanced civilization eventually creates self replicating nanobots that convert everything into paperclips

[@adamwu4565]

Given lightspeed lag, an IBC that spans a few hundred to a thousand star systems is still very likely to experience at least some degree of political and cultural fragmentation within its zone of influence. You could still get diplomatic drama, trade disputes, and even a few interstellar wars. All the juice space opera stuff. And such a civilization, if fully developed, would be many many times more capable and powerful than your standard sci fi polities like the Galactic Empire or the Federation (at least minus their physics violating magic tech). And if humanity is ultimately restricted to an expansion of no more than 100-1000 other stars in a bubble around Sol, that is still a sphere filled with immense resources and promise of incredible opportunity for expansion and advancement, and would, to me, still be an exceedingly optimistic potential future.

[@kevinriseborough1521]

I would imagine there is a massive exclusion zone around our solar system with signs saying something along the lines of “Do not feed the monkeys, they are mad!!”

[@scpenny1]

Thank you for another great episode I can paint my WH40k minis to!

[@uncleanunicorn4571]

the Gorn from star trek, Strange new worlds are like this. They yearn to hunt and devour mammals And plant parasitic eggs inside their Sentient prey, This makes Them poor candidates for federation membership. When they communicate, it is to propose borders and barriers.Since they realize they don't have the numbers to conquer and devour all the tasty mammals they might wish to.

[@my_chi_is_rising]

SNACKS READY LETS LEARN

[@aserta]

33:54 ... that might not be an intentional thing, but a "product of design". I mean, at least for me and a few people i've seen play in games where you have a static base with resources that don't re-spawn, you either start close or you start further away leaving your close area full for emergencies. But... that last one never really works out.

[@heekomogwin]

We don’t see them because they are too far away. We are seeing the past. We can’t see right now that far away

[@Lucas-mf1tc]

What if every civilization achieves ultimate unlimited pleasure. Eventually ending in extinction, leaving behind super computers running empty simulations of immortal ai.

[@Dex0Milan]

That idea of separation and minimal contact remind me of C.J.Cherryh's Foreigner series...

[@sarcasmo57]

To me, this seems less likely than aliens are outside the parameters of our simulation.

[@Synthpopper]

Simulation theory is nothing but self-important human drivel and arrogance

[@carlospomares3225]

8:04 "Or they took one look at our internet and decided we're already too weird to handle" Many people on the internet assume that this is the caes, lol

[@mrrob7531]

Could it really be that simple…our invitation to the cosmic party got lost in the mail?? Knowing the US Mail…YUP!

[@placebogazebo9671]

The speed of light is only an impediment if your nervous system operates at a speed that makes it such. If you live for 1,000,000 years and a thought takes a day, you might not find a 10,000 year journey to a neighboring star system to be a long time. What makes you think the "alien" caretakers of Earth haven't already prevented extinction level asteroid impacts? And if you find any pulverized castrodinium floating around a once existing neutr... uh, buffer zone outpost, you know you have problems incoming.

[@Ian_sothejokeworks]

Picturing the Ents from 'Lord of the Rings' being well-suited to long space journeys. "I am Groot," indeed!

[@Klikoderat]

But what if the solution is that interstellair empires can't exist? What if FTL doesn't exist, cryosleep never works, generation ships are not viable, and so on. Maybe we can't see any aliens because they are all in the same situation as we are.

[@michaelstreeter3125]

The Zoo hypothesis or "half interdiction" makes sense to me. If I was busy gardening and discovered a new plant or animal (on Earth) I would immediately restore as much of its environment as I could, and stand back to let it grow naturally and see how it worked/survived; I can imagine aliens thinking maybe study of a new, growing, blossoming system could reveal something about their distant past, long lost and forgotten. The bastards. 👽

[@playframe6231]

Maybe for every star we see, there is a dyson swarm that is far from being detectable

[@greggweber9967]

15:30 The need for More individual power comes into play.

[@fingerinalightsocket2309]

I don't like star trek but the replicators always made me think. You brought it up in this video but a solution to the fermi paradox could be there's always some supervillian type that just makes a weapon beyond comprehension with their replicator Might be a little off topic for the video but that's something I've thought about a lot

[@playframe6231]

We havent looked nearly enough to adk the question

[@scottjuhnke6825]

As an episode of Love, Death + Robots pointed out, intelligence is a bad survival strategy.

[@LezlyLikesYuri]

Yet in that same episode the intelligence stated that some problems require a more nuanced understanding of things from time to time, more than just simple instinct of chemical processescould ever provide. Just because the big brain thing is hibernating most of the time dosnt mean that it isn't there, or not vital for continued survival. Sometimes you just gotta have a good think about things, ya know?

[@t.kersten7695]

at first i was assuming something different here until i translated the word "Interdiction" into german. when i read the word first, i was thinking, it has the meaning of something in between two other points or so - just like us living in a time with little to non higher evolved live around us - a barren "intermediate" part of time between two eras bustleing with life. it is always so difficult for me to imagine how full of ressources space is - no matter of how many SFIA-videos i´ve already watched. so i´m again trying to imagine, some civilisation - even in an STL-only universe - would´ve tried to collcet as much planets and ressources out of the border zones to keep thoses ressources available, while at the same time preventing other species to settle or even evolve in that borderlands. not every species out there - even in an STL-only Universe - might agree on such a life of limited expansion.

[@darkorion69]

I do wonder if humanity was seeded on Earth when an extragalactic prison transport from a nearby galaxy dropped us off in galaxy without any other intelligent life to protect say Andromeda from whatever our ancestors did to need to be marooned here

[@FireStormOOO_]

Seems like the smart version in interdiction is less about enforcing a deadzone around your homeworld and more about the light speed limit creating a natural pressure to keep your civilization small in radius, if not in population or mass. You've touched on this in the past but don't seem to have followed the line of reasoning all the way through. There's nothing obviously special about the same population spread out across many stars vs in mega-structures in the home system, and obvious benefits to keeping everyone within a few LY bubble. And with what's already been described here, why wouldn't you just bring any useful raw materials back to your home system where the population and industrial base already is? Especially since on the time scales we're talking about, there's nothing stopping you from studying the star system in question for millennia, documenting everything of interest in perfect detail, and only then disassembling the system for raw materials.

[@NovoCognition]

I would be inclined to agree. In a no-FTL universe, it makes a great deal of sense to keep the population within the radius of the Dyson-swarm / heliopause of one's home star & have automated drones to strip-mine nearly everything else that one can reach & send back. Though personally, I do hope for FTL somehow being possible.

[@Sukotto82]

Humans can't even get along with each other without fighting. I don't see Humans being any better with alien civilizations.

[@nicolasolton]

I wonder if it is possible around other sun's for a different kind of life to evolve that relies less on killing or controlling other life for food and energy. If not, then we probably really do live in a dark forest...

[@markriosn7589]

It does makes logical sense, similar to the balance of power after Napoleon in Europe. Hard to imagine what a total war between large galactic powers would look like but I'm certain that it wouldn't look pretty and probably be best to avoid it

[@greggweber9967]

It's not just big far threats. It's the nearby, say 100 Light Years, that should be looked at. Not just for threats, but signs of further threats. Different lifeforms have different capabilities and customs. Example: When we from Earth met the Mumbai and their customs.

[@AdamVollmer]

I'm going to guess you meant Minbari and that was auto corrected.

[@dustinking2965]

The Algebraist is Bank's best "M" book, IMO. I haven't read the non-M ones.

[@marcelgrabowski5939]

There is certain another flaw in this approach as well; if one, *one* civilisation made Gardener Fleet, they are not really gonna stop in like ever, not even talking about it being far more than one Gardener Fleet, because they most likely will both split and multiply over time, hunting them down is not going to be particularly easy task, assuming they have big jumpstart and engines good enough to achieve high percentage of light speed. Sure, projectiles would catch up eventually, but it may be a very, very long time, during which practically whole galaxy can get settled and that is asuming that Gardener Fleets don't make countermeasures or are entirely unaware of the threat. Those Isolated civilisations may be a problem, unless Gardeners just avoid them. "In this case, there might actually be dragons." Civilisation of dragons that once visited earth and sparked all the myths about dragons:

[@wolvenar]

Stargates as the TV series describe would upend this theory of size limitations.

[@chaucermcdoogle6011]

Aye we just don't know if stargates or warp drives are possible on our tech tree

[@wolvenar]

@@chaucermcdoogle6011 Yes. Unfortunately we don't have nearly enough understanding to accomplish this, even if we knew it was possible.

[@miketaylor7023]

No one can determine what any specific aliens or groups of them would be like or how they could act . That would be a range of all possibilities within the wave function of total possibilities. The time frames you run into them , their attitudes or beliefs, their development that shapes their attitudes and behaviors , conditions on their worlds, or even how sane they or any of us are , intellectual development , knowledge development within the individual , and the relationship between the different alien species are all random factors with complex mathematics branching deep into exponential complexities. It's not so much what you may think or believe. It's what IS and the reality that we have to figure out more so before contact between alien worlds. It's the RELATIONSHIP and the degree of honesty if at all possible in that relationship that tends to reduce friction and attempt to avoid misunderstandings. You wouldn't want to just rush in and meet any aliens. At first you want to study them if it ever happens at all. And you have to keep in mind there exists a substantial fraction of insanity that occurs in emergent intelligence related to universal entropy in all matter. When the animals kill for food does that make them psychopaths? There are many many questions that lead to intellectual investigations that have never been explored fully or at all really.

[@highchamp1]

A lot of the above (within realistic scenarios) Distance, Time, Situation, Choices (Math) 3 Body problem Highly advanced (Sophistication, Complexity) Vs Cunning and Brute force (Love or Fear) Vietnamese

[@Echo_Online]

Isn't the galaxy dynamic, such that the "neighbours" of any given system change over time? In that case isn't maintaining a static bubble impossible? At the very least any space farer would be motivated to send out von Neumann probes either as an early warning system or to turn the galaxy into bricks rather than wait around for colonies to drift away or newly awakened enemies to drift closer

[@Truth_Teller_101]

Did you read about the probe that tunneled into Uranus and discovered Dark Matter?

[@philipdavy3039]

Stimulating as ever. A consequence would also seem to be that for any groups or civilizations that do attempt exploration/expansion, there is a very strong incentive to have extremely stealthy interstellar ships.

[@vaultscribe4501]

Has anyone thought about how a combination of these paradoxes might be true, and that a given combination would lead to a static appearance of a lonely galaxy? Especially for anyone not able to travel faster than light.

[@istvanvincze7411]

Ah yes, the final boss of any good ideas. *BUREAUCRACY*

[@cacogenicist]

The first technological civilization in a galaxy likely has a very big headstart, and _plenty_ of time to locate every old biosphere in the galaxy where technological civilization might develop. The first civ should have at the _very least_ tens of million of years before the next one starts colonizing. So the first civ doesn't have -- one way or another -- much of anything to worry about with subsequent civilizations. The first civ has no restrictions with respect to life from separate abiogenesis events.

[@thingonathinginathing]

Cant wait to see what Isaac does with his videos once he finally learns that 👽NHI & UAP🛸 are already here.

[@jhwheuer]

We simply do not grasp how big and old the place really is. In the time light crosses the milky way, civilizations rise and fall more than a thousand times… and no signal would be strong enough to make it across in a identifiable way. We are alone separated by two abysses: space and time.

[@GrigoriZhukov]

No communication using means we currently use.

[@cosmictreason2242]

Op you are incorrect. Check the alien beacons episode. Intentional beacons can be seen at galactic distances. Any dyson can do it

[@jhwheuer]

@@cosmictreason2242 sweet Summer Child 🤗

[@cosmictreason2242]

@@jhwheuer bro. Don't be ignorant. Learn.

[@anticarrrot]

But... If you can have one self reinforcing treaty that everyone follows, couldn't you have others? Because that sounds like a situation where everyone is (in one way) already getting along.

[@Kaltes1]

My thoughts are, how many of the just maybe solutions would it take to make a very good combined solution? In my mind rare intelligence, interdiction, and bit of berserker probe with a dash of dark forest derived from the other two solutions would be pretty solid.