The Fermi Paradox: Digital Empires & Miniaturization

Many believe the future of humanity is to go Digital, uploading our minds to computers, living in virtual worlds that are vastly more efficient and compact. If we might do this, might distant alien empires too? And if so, might this be the reason we don't see them?

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Credits:
The Fermi Paradox: Digital Empires & Miniaturization
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur
Episode 319, December 2, 2021
Written, Produced & Narrated by Isaac Arthur

Editors:
A.T. Long
Jerry Guern

Cover Art:

Graphics:
Mihail Yordanov

[OlleLinge]

"The mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be the Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog."

[nathanhudelson]

The Matrioska civilization discussed towards the end is such a fascinating concept to me. The way the different shells offer different experiences of time and different levels of social connectivity is mind-bending to think about. I mean, imagine how much the societies in each ring could evolve and diverge from one another, some changing thousands of times faster than others. Obviously this would be dampened somewhat by the immortality of individuals, as I assume that would decrease the general population’s propensity for change, but still! It’s crazy to think about, and I’d kill for a nice Sci Fi book that dug into all the implications of it.

Great video as always Isaac!

[KarlRosner]

One of my favourite personal story ideas I keep meaning to write about is a type of medical nanite that posses a gestalt sentient mind. They only live in the human body and are symbiotic with "their" human. Their focus however is on the macro scale, so they don't care much about what their human does in their day to day life but more on how it effects their shared body which is their home.

[goldenfloof]

I remember reading the bobiverse series wondering why one of the bobs hadn't just decided to dedicate an entire system towards making the largest VR simulation in the entire bob empire.

[janisleimanis]

Solution for fermy paradox is that civilisations miniturise their colony fleets, that come to earth, but every time they get eaten by a small dog.

[jeremypace]

Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, April 2001, "Cockroaches" by Joseph Manizone had several neighboring aliens living in Virtual Reality on their homeworlds, making "bubble universes" with their VR that connected to other alien worlds in VR space only via hyperspace. Travel in real-space was unheard of. Until they found a new planet, Earth, whose inhabitants were making progress with space probes instead of VR.

[jtrain]

Has there ever been an episode done where, if we were looking out at the stars, what a civilization expanding out past its home star or even a digital civilization look like to our ground based equipment? How could we tell if there was something truly anomalous happening around a star? And how far away can we detect strange activity before it fades into the background?

[talkingBS]

I pondered on this idea in a less scifi way before. For example i am a large man <6’ 260lbs and my wife is a tiny <5’ 100lb woman. I though what if everyone was her size we would need much less food and energy (smaller cars and houses) to maintain the same standard of living. Neat to watch your video.

The vr concept (matrix) is also interesting and part of my pondering.

[Tehom]

Good discussion of the tradeoffs of large Dyson spheres - large size for cooling, small size for interconnectedness. (Or Dyson swarms, but let's not get caught up in that. Dyson called them spheres)
I've often thought that we might do better by using a large sphere as a huge heat rejector and conveying the refrigerant to a smaller inner sphere where the computation is done. Heat transfer by conduction or convection is generally more efficient than radiative heat transfer. One downside would be that it would take many years for the refrigerant mass to make a complete orbit so you're not getting as much use out of it as you could.

[thunderblitz]

I always love your videos about life in our universe and the lack there of

[pierredefermat]

This video was worth waiting for 500 years!

[zyfigamer]

I’m interested in the vertical farms episode. It essentially means all food can be locally produced. More efficient in the end, and it frees up land.

[yog-sothothery]

After doing some research on what future computers will be like I am amazed at what I found these digital empire technologies are awesome.

[JohanDippenaar]

I would like to see a video where you talk about the thinking process you use to tackle these topics. Anyone else?

[melvinhogberg]

i wonder what we really could become in the future. i often think about that transhuman in house of suns, abraham was his name i think. Very cool stuff. good video isaac!!

[leviathan]

Wouldn't it be advantageous for the outer rings to run slower and manage the deep space mining/colonization efforts and let the inner rings not have to worry about that stuff? And they could be on rotating shifts so you spend a few years in the outer ring then spend a few centuries in the inner ring or just stay in the outer ring if thats your preference.

[desertmaker]

I love your work man keep it up please. The Fermi paradox is one of my favorite things to ponder.
Given just blind luck and happenstance to provide an opportunity for life and an observable universe that seems around 14 billion light years in any direction it would seem to me that we must be among the very earliest to develop possibly even the first truly technological civilization.
Give me a moment for this, even starting with say hydrogen and discounting all subatomic activity as factors for simplicity, consider the number of fusions required to produce enough materials to form a human ( I will not even touch the numbers required to produce such an elaborate electromagnetic machine from biological parts) even given a trillion stars per galaxy and a trillion galaxies in the known universe so we have greater chances of success and start with that as our proxy universe.
The deck is stacked in favor of life forming as we have unlimited time to achieve it. What we supposedly know of the universe relies on "inflation" to grant us the space to perform our task. What if it never happened and what we see as the inflationary period was merely due to proximity of mass and time dilation caused by such mass. In other words it just looks like inflation due to our current temporal perspective.
What I am driving at is simply are we a really lucky fast solution or is the universe far older than we think.

[Dragrath]

One thing to point out is that while not unlimited miniaturization to some extent could be done fully biologically. After all humans are primates which compared to other mammals have somewhat done this on evolutionary terms, however we are far from the pinnacle of biological life birds have far more compact brains which use multiple sizes of neurons arranged into neural lattices. This is why birds can be so smart despite being so small compared to us and they still have fully meat brains despite what some crazy conspiracy theorists on the internet might claim.

[oLevLovesLove]

I'm imagining a prisoners dilemma where people defect from living IRL because they can do so much more in a simulation and a further layer where people inside the simulation defect from the main sim to become asynchronous or "desync" because they want to do over events, live in a different time or basically be catered to by their personal reality.

[UrdnotChuckles]

I figure there's no reason why a civilization wouldn't be filled up with both the biological, cybernetic, fully synthetic, and people that live digitally full time, part time, or some mixture of all of the above. And even having a lot of the latter would only be a delaying tactic for expansion. You'd still want to head to the stars eventually!