waveman comments on Fermi paradox of human past, and corresponding x-risks - Less Wrong

6 Post author: turchin 01 October 2016 05:01PM

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

Comments (18)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: waveman 09 October 2016 08:52:42AM 2 points [-]

An extra data point. If we crash and burn, then earth will be too hot for multicellular life by the time the coal and oil are replenished. So the one and only industrial revolution has happened.

And given ~4,000m years of life so far and the heating only a few hundred million years away, we only just made it. Which suggests it is pretty hard to build intelligent life. Maybe because computation is very expensive so the gradient is steep. Robin Hanson has a paper on this point.