FaceDeer

I recall reading once upon a time that the original idea for this exemption was that it was for literal scholars - a few hundred priestly intellectual sorts that were professional serious full-time Torah-studiers. But the exemption didn’t have any specific criteria listed for what that meant, so the ultra-orthodox all wound up saying “yeah, I study the Torah all day too, so I qualify.”

You communicate with co-workers using natural languages but that doesn’t make co-workers useless. You just have to account for the strengths and weaknesses of that mechanism in your workflow.

Sure, in those situations. I find that it doesn’t take that much effort to write a prompt that gets me something useful in most situations, though. You just need to make some effort. A lot of people don’t put in any effort, get a bad result, and conclude “this tech is useless.”

It also isn’t telepathic, so the only thing it has to go on when determining “what you want” is what you tell it you want.

I often see people gripe about how ChatGPT’s essay writing style is mediocre and always sounds the same, for example. But that’s what you get when you just tell ChatGPT “write me an essay about X.” It doesn’t know what kind of essay you want unless you tell it. You have to give it context and direction to get good results.

“Just give me this and I’ll do the rest” is actually a pretty great workflow, in my experience. AI isn’t at the point where you can just set it loose to work on its own but as a collaborator it saves me a huge amount of hassle and time.

Sometimes peoples’ heads just fall apart.

Well, rarely.

Okay, once. Sheer coincidence that it was such a prominent person and in such a prominent moment. And that Lee Harvey Oswald just happened to be cleaning his gun by that window at the time. But hey, sometimes weird coincidences happen.

I don’t think you’ve thought through the logistics required for the sort of war where you’d just go around and shoot everyone who lives in hundreds of solar systems. Even assuming they do nothing at all to defend themselves, how do you even find them all?

Of course it is! We are simultaneously facing a labor shortage and mass unemployment. The important thing is to keep being angry and frightened, the specific subject you’re angry about at any given time is flexible.

My advice against getting too deeply invested applies to those companies and communities as well.

I once got permabanned from a politics subreddit (I think it was /r/canadapolitics) that had a “downvoting is not permitted” rule, because there was a guy getting downvotes and I offered him an explanation for why I thought he was getting them. That counted as evidence that I had downvoted him, I guess.

My response: I sent one message to the mods that was essentially “really?” And then when there was no response I unsubbed from that subreddit and moved on. I see no point in participating in subreddits with ridiculous rules and ridiculous enforcement.

Granted, unsubbing from politics subreddits is generally a good idea even when not banned. But eh.

The only other subreddit I’m banned in is /r/artisthate, which I never visited in the first place. Apparently they scan other subreddits for signs of users who don’t hate artificial intelligence enough and preemptively ban them. That was kind of hilarious.

Anyway, I guess my advice is don’t get too deeply “invested” in a community that can be so easily and arbitrarily taken away from you in the first place. And also manage your passwords better.

It’s not specifically oxygen that’s linked to life, it’s chemical disequilibrium. Oxygen is highly reactive, there are lots of minerals that will bind it up and there aren’t any natural geological processes that unbind it again in significant quantities. If you put an oxygen atmosphere on a lifeless planet then pretty soon all of the oxygen will be bound up in other compounds - carbon dioxide, silicon oxides, ferric oxides, and so forth. There has to be some process that’s constantly producing oxygen in vast quantities to keep Earth’s atmosphere in the state that it’s in.

There are other chemicals that could also be taken as signs of life, depending on the conditions on a planet. Methane, for example, also has a short lifespan under Earthlike conditions. You may have seen headlines a little while back about the detection of “life signs” on Venus, in that case it was phosphine gas (PH3) that they thought they’d spotted (turns out it may have been a false alarm). These sorts of gasses can be detected in planetary atmospheres at interstellar distances, especially in the case of something like Earth where it’s quite flagrant.

Even if these are sometimes false alarms, in a “Dark Forest” scenario it’d still be worth sending a probe to go and kill whatever planets exhibit signs like that. It’s a lot cheaper and quieter than trying to fight an actual civilization. That’s why I can’t see why we wouldn’t have already been wiped out aeons ago in this scenario.

But that’s not actually true. We’ve been “broadcasting” the fact that there’s life on Earth in the form of the spectrographic signature of an oxygen-rich atmosphere, which is a clear sign that photosynthesis is going on. There’s no geological process that could maintain that much oxygen in the atmosphere. The Great Oxidation Event is when that started.

We have the technology to detect this kind of thing already, at our current level. Any civilization that could reach out and attack another solar system would be able to very easily see it.

Well, “relatively cheaply” is a hard standard to nail down. I would say “no”, though. Antimatter is very expensive to manufacture and store and you’re going to need a lot of it. All of the energy that comes out of an RKV hitting its target has to be put into it in the first place, probably several times over given the inefficiencies likely inherent in the process.

You could have left at any time.

The problem for the Fermi paradox is that there’s no reason to do stuff like that before we start colonizing other solar systems.

Also, how do you destroy a civilization that has a Dyson swarm already? That’s not exactly an easy task, and if you insist on remaining stealthy yourself it’s nigh impossible.

Relativistic missiles. Nothing moves faster than the speed of light. So if you can get a big rock to go 95% of the speed of light, we’d only be able to detect that it’s coming right as it hits.

This is a very common answer to “how”, but it comes with lots of problems in the Dark Forest context.

• If you actually calculate how much energy is required to boost a big rock up to that speed you run into lots of difficulties. It takes a lot, a heck of a lot. How does a civilization that is “hiding” accumulate that energy? How does it store it long-term?
• How is that energy actually put into the rock? This is basically a starship accelerating up to that speed and getting a starship up to that velocity is not easy even if you have the energy available. Does it have a rocket? The rocket equation for getting up to near-lightspeed requires ridiculous amounts of propellant. Is it beam-propelled? You’re not being at all stealthy that way. How much acceleration can you get out of your system? It takes a full year at one Earth gravity of acceleration to get up near lightspeed, and that’s a really high acceleration - you generally trade acceleration for efficiency so the faster you want to get up to speed the more energy you need and the noisier you’ll be.
• It actually is possible to counter an RKV. It’s much easier to hit and destroy an RKV than it is to launch it, all you need to do is get a pebble in its path. The key is detection, and the above points give some pretty good options for detecting it before and during launch. That gives you time to fire your countermeasures.

And ESPECIALLY if your civilization is still mostly planetbound.

Absolutely not guaranteed to be the case. Earth’s civilization could have easily had offworld colonies by now if circumstances had been slightly different, so a Fermi paradox solution that requires reliably blowing up Earthlike civilizations before they can get offworld doesn’t work. They’re already too late.

As I said previously, Earth has been quite obviously life-bearing for at least 2 billion years. Why wait until something like an RKV is needed, and even that is not guaranteed? They could have destroyed life on Earth far easier, and thus far more stealthily, if they’d done it a billion years ago.

How do they do it, though? It’s not really a valid solution unless you can explain how it works, otherwise it’s just “maybe some magic happens that kills civilizations.”

Once a civilization has begun spreading to hundreds of other solar systems I have yet to hear of any plausible way to reliably “kill” it.

I think others wouldn’t bother with us until we started demonstrating likelihood of using dangerous tech or crazy exponential expansion.

Why do you think that, though? It doesn’t make sense, frankly - if you’re worried about competition evolving you shouldn’t wait until the last possible second to destroy it. That raises so many unnecessary risks of being slightly slow on the draw, and then it’s too late. Why not do it at the earliest convenience, when it’s super easy to do by comparison and there’s an incredibly long margin of error if you somehow miss the first couple of tries?

I don’t remember well, but I think civilizations stationed their defensive or offensive tech away from their own civilizations, just dispersed around.

I think its explanation for why no one or anything has colonized the galaxy though is that if anyone shows signs of becoming that strong, they get zapped.

But they’re already doing it, you just said they’re putting outposts out there. If they can’t do that secretly then the Dark Forest doesn’t work in the first place. Placing a secret weapon base in another solar system is no different from placing a colony there.

My real preferred theory of why we don’t see other civilizations though is that I think they choose more inward, VR, computer-based evolution that doesn’t result in big mega structures.

As with many Fermi paradox solutions this one fails on account of requiring every single civilization (and every single subset of those civilizations) to all decide to do exactly the same thing, forever, with no exceptions. In a scenario like this what happens if a single subculture of a single advanced civilization decides for whatever reason that they prefer not to do that? They would be able to spread throughout the cosmos without opposition, everyone else is locked in their little dream boxes and therefore is basically irrelevant. It only needs to happen once, and the universe has been around for a very long time.

We actually spend a great deal of effort preventing it. Environmentalism is a really big thing these days.

But even if we didn’t, it’s not an extinction event for us. Humans are actually doing extremely well.

The “Dark Forest” is fine for a scary sci-fi series, but it has many flaws that make it unrealistic as a real solution to the Fermi paradox.

• Earth has been quite obviously life-bearing for at least 2 billion years. We should have been wiped out long ago.
• The book series made up fantasy magic tech for how exactly a civilization can be destroyed by another without giving away their own location. I’ve yet to see an explanation for how that would be done in reality that doesn’t give away the attacker’s location.
• It doesn’t explain why nobody has colonized the galaxy.