Toggle comments on Open Thread, Jun. 15 - Jun. 21, 2015 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Gondolinian 15 June 2015 12:02AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (302)
Tags: open_thread

Comments (302)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: D_Malik 16 June 2015 04:46:55AM *  1 point [-]

Could Malthusian tragedy be the Great Filter? Meaning, maybe most civilizations, before they develop AGI or space colonization, breed so much that everyone is too busy trying to survive and reproduce to work on AGI or spaceflight, until a supernova or meteor or plague kills them off.

Since humans don't seem to be headed into this trap, alien species who do fall into this trap would have to differ from humans. Some ways this might happen:

  • They're r-selected like insects, i.e. their natural reproduction process involves creating lots of children and then allowing most to die. Once technology makes resources abundant, most of the children survive, leading to an extreme population boom. This seems unlikely, since intelligence is more valuable to species that have few children and invest lots of resources in each child.
  • Their reproduction mechanism does not require a 9-month lead time like humans' do; maybe they take only one day to produce a small egg, which then grows externally to the body. This would mean one wealthy alien that wants a lot of children could very quickly create very many children, rapidly causing the population's mean desire-for-children to skyrocket.
  • Their lifespans are shorter, so evolution more quickly "realizes" that there's an abundance of resources, and thus the aliens evolve to reproduce a lot. The shorter lifespan would also produce a low ceiling on technological progress, since children would have to be brought up to speed on current science before they can discover new science. This seems unlikely because intelligence benefits from long lifespans.
  • Evolution programs them to desperately want to maximize the number of fit children they have, even before they develop civilization. Evolution didn't do this to humans - why not?

Human technological progress doesn't seem to be as fast as it can be, though, which suggests that there's a lot of "slack" time in which civilizations can develop technologically before evolving to be more Malthusian.

Comment author: Toggle 16 June 2015 01:32:34PM 1 point [-]

I have two somewhat contradictory arguments.

First, this is probably a poor candidate for the great filter because it lacks the quality of comprehensiveness. Remember that a threat is not a candidate for a great filter if it merely exterminates 90%, or 99%, of all sentient species. Under those conditions, it's still quite easy to populate the stars with great and powerful civilizations, and so such a threat fails to explain the silence. Humans seem to have ably evaded the malthusian threat so far, in such a way that is not immediately recognizable as a thermodynamic miracle, so it's reasonable to expect that a nontrivial fraction of all civilizations would do so. At least up to our current stage of development.

Second, I'll point out that bullets two and four are traits possessed by digital intelligences in competition with one another (possibly the first as well), and they supplement it with a bullet you should have included but didn't- functional immortality. These conditions correspond to what Nick Bostrom calls a 'multipolar scenario', a situation in which there exist a number of different superintelligences with contradicting values. And indeed, there are many smart people who think about the dangers of these selection pressures to a sufficiently advancd civilization.

So, malthusian pressures on biological systems are unlikely to explain the apparent lack of spacefaring civilizations. On the other hand, malthusian pressures on technologically optimized digital entities (possibly an obligate stage of civilization) may be much more of a threat, perhaps even one deserving the name 'Great Filter'.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit