28 KiB
[RT] The Great Filter
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Author: u/ednever *
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Score: 86
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Created: 2016-06-07T00:48:50
Post:
Comments:
u/ednever [+30] (3 minutes later)
Short fiction. About 4000 words. Read time ~10 minutes.
It was inspired by a lot of rationalist stuff I have been reading. Especially from Robin Hanson's Great Filter and Brain Emulations and SlateStarCodex's take on it.
Would love feedback.
Thanks and enjoy.
(Just want to say: I read almost everything posted here (and much of what is recommended). This is definitely my favorite sub-reddit. Thanks for all of you that write for me...)
u/callmebrotherg [+12] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (an hour later)
I love this story and I am so glad that this subreddit inspired you to write it. I love love love stories that take weird scientific takes on concepts. "Time travel is basically a thing that happens all the time, naturally" is something that I haven't come across before. It's fresh.
I have some technical-type critiques, if you'd be interested in them, but the story overall is pretty good.
I have now tagged you with "not-so-secret time traveler fighting the apocalypse" (I also have a weakness for stories that claim to be real accounts just masquerading as fiction for one purpose or another).
u/ednever [+3] (4 hours later)
Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it. Would love the technical critiques. Feel free to PM or email if that makes more sense. (Email is on the webpage)
u/callmebrotherg [+2] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (22 hours later)
I'll email it.
Expect something in a week or so (I'm in the middle of a lot of work, and I want to actually give some time to the proofreading).
u/vakusdrake [+12] (an hour later)
Honestly the only solution I can come up with for this problem is to develop a GAI, they are the only entities with enough power to ensure their civilization never develops time travel if it's so easy.
Of course the problem is that given it's supposed to be much harder to develop than time travel I can't imagine it would be easy to ensure GAI comes first. So how would you control tech development to that degree?
I suspect any answer would have to involve massive unstable conspiracies or world domination, and you can't rush development because normal AI safety problems still exist.
u/Endovior [+18] (5 hours later)
This is actually the background to the novel Singularity Sky; an AI figures out how to receive messages from future versions of itself, thus triggering the Singularity. So far as any humans can tell, the primary thing this AI does is enforce causality, as per the commandment:
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.
u/callmebrotherg [+7] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (4 hours later)
Keep doing the research yourself, and sending yourself back in time. Even if the research is very, very slow, you just have to keep rinsing and repeating.
u/Roxolan [+10] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (4 hours later)
You'd have to go back to an era far enough that nobody else has a chance to invent time travel, but close enough that you still have the tools to make a time machine yourself.
This might be a pretty small window. But hey, if you're gonna kill yourself and wipe out the universe for the greater good anyway, might as well do it every year.
u/Dwood15 [+2] (a day later)
Basically. You'd have to get so smart that you could with the proper knowledge, develop the proper tools for time travel, while at the same time asserting yourself as the world power, or find ways of detecting time travel devices.
u/Roxolan [+2] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (2 days later)
And you don't want your plan to be too complicated (and I include world domination in that category). Over the eons, with each iteration of yourself being slightly different from the previous one, there will be plenty of opportunities for butterfly effects to mess up even the best-laid plans.
u/Dwood15 [+3] (2 days later)
The thing that frightens me is that every instance you go back in time, you HAVE to make sure that you do not allow any other person to go back in time before you.
If you don't, you have failed and have potentially caused the great filter.
u/ednever [+4] (4 hours later)
I like it.
I think it would involve coordination of people sending back help on multiple iterations. Each one helping to develop GAI a little faster/better.
If you do all that research in the past before the public tech gets to time travel (and then the conspiracy activated time travel before anyone else could) you might have a way to make it happen.
u/Roxolan [+10] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (an hour later)
I like it! I'm already well acquainted with "time travel as genocide", but this is the first time I've seen the GF twist. Good insight/length ratio.
You may want to remove the Horcrux reference; it adds a barrier to entry, and is not very sensical even for Harry Potter readers.
However, if you're feeling cheeky, you could try to work in a reference to pop culture that doesn't exist in our timeline. If you can make it obvious yet seemingly not deliberate.
u/ednever [+6] (4 hours later)
Thanks. Horclux wasn't the word I was looking for but I couldn't find the actual word.
There is a word for the idea there is a "gremlin" controlling things behind your brain. It starts with an H, but I can't think of the word and I haven't been able to find it with google searches.
Help?
u/Roxolan [+11] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (4 hours later)
u/ednever [+4] (4 hours later)
Yes! Thank you!
u/ednever [+3] (16 hours later)
Changed. Thank you!
u/narfanator [+8] (4 hours later)
Thank you for writing this, but I find the moral positions in this story silly, for the most part (immortal twin is accurate). That said, the "random walk" model is actually really compelling.
Temporally looped information is, near as I can imagine, experimentally identical to a Boltzman Brain situation. So there's no reason to believe you killed an entire universe of anything, and even if you did, you should also believe that you created an entire universe of that same anything. Mork's not born, Gork is, and it's a push.
As for the model... there is the third terminus state: Invent, but not use, time travel. This seems to me to imminently reasonable, given sane time taveller: First thing you do is create a looped failsafe: If extinct, send time traveler; now the bottom line loops just like the first, and over infinite iterations, the walk will progress as a balance.
An interesting side effect is that we'd expect to see dead alien civilizations where exactly the wrong thing happened; basically, the opposite of this: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3994
u/CCC_037 [+9] (7 hours later)
Hmmm.
The desired terminus state is given as "time travel is not invented", but that's not quite right. The actual desired terminus state is "intelligent life continues to exist". In order for this to happen, it is necessary that humanity develop sufficient, independent off-Earth colonies before time travel is invented, and then no-one ever travels back to before that time. (As noted in the story, once you have enough colonies, even with a high probability of a given colony dying off, stellar expansion becomes a near-certainty).
It's easy to push for the discovery of a given technology, given time travel as presented in the story (and assuming you're sufficiently ruthless). You simply do the research, calculate when-and-where you want it to be discovered, pick a person who's in the right place at the write time, time-travel back into his head and produce the required scientific paper. When you need funding directed to a specific place, overwrite Bill Gates in the past and direct it as needed. (Or overwrite some random person, but bring with you memories of the performance of the stock market after that date. Or the next winning lottery numbers.) So, it should be relatively straightforward to arrange for the discovery and funding of space travel. It shouldn't be hard to arrange for it to be done, either - not when you can have the loudest denigrators of the project suddenly and inexplicably drop any and all objections pretty much on command.
Then, once you have (say) a dozen planets colonised, you just need to find some way of preventing anyone from travelling back to before that time, whether or not they figure out time travel...
u/Izeinwinter [+11] (10 hours later)
Star travel won't work to solve this because you remain vulnerable to someone going back to before it happened. You need humanity to leave the lightcone defined by the birth of the first hominid advanced enough to be overwritten. That is a much higher bar to clear. And since FTL is time travel..
Basically, you need to leave this universe for one in which time travel is not possible. Whoo-hoo. Doozy of a problem.
But at least this setting does provide a compelling reason for entire civilizations to abandon this reality - any remnants they leave eventually get retconned out of existence, so "Abandon ship" isn't ruled out as a solve by fermi.
u/CCC_037 [+10] (11 hours later)
If you need to know where and when your target is to time travel back to it, then you could do a lot towards preventing time travel by simply erasing all records of pre-star-travel civilisation...
u/None [+2] (6 days later)
Hey, did you know the earth was literal made 6000 years ago and your adam and eve; what do you mean I god looks human? I made you in my image duh
u/ajuc [+6] (8 hours later)
You can create doomsday device that uses timetravel if humanity is extinct (timer counting down unless someone resets it, when 0 timetravel the stored brain to predetermined person at the start of the loop with proper instructions to recrete the watchdog).
Then the "humanity extinct" isn't a stop condition anymore.
u/None [+4] (14 hours later)
That would just delay the inevitable. After enough loops an event will happen that destroys both humanity and the doomsday device.
u/ajuc [+5] (14 hours later)
Create many of them. It becomes reliability engineering problem.
u/RMcD94 [+3] (16 hours later)
All you're doing is increasing the length of time
u/ajuc [+3] (17 hours later)
yes. Possibly beyond the thermal death of universe
u/RMcD94 [+4] (20 hours later)
The heat death of the universe activate the fail safe, you have to beat infinite odds I'm afraid
u/ajuc [+3] (20 hours later)
That can be engineered around. It's not like it will be a surprise when it happens.
On the other hand when a timeline going all the way to the end of universe already happened - what better can we hope for? Isn't a reset in such circumstances the best possible option? Yes it will result in death of everybody and small chance of humanity vanishing in next turn (and big chance of humanity vanishing eventually), but humanity is vanishing anyway because of heat death, and after reset even if humanity vanishes - most probably some other species will have their turn.
u/RMcD94 [+3] (20 hours later)
I agree, you extend the universe lifespan for almost, but not infinite cycles
u/CCC_037 [+1] (a day later)
Also, the stored brain on the doomsday device should regularly be able to look over news headlines so that, when it goes back in time, it has at least some idea of how the world went kablooie and how to prevent it next time around.
u/None [+6] (14 hours later)
Since the universe still exists when you first travel through time, you know that your use of time travel is the first instance of it in that loop. Go back a few years before you invent it, wait until shortly before you invented it before, and send yourself back again. Repeat. You now have a personal eternity to solve the problem.
u/Roxolan [+8] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (15 hours later)
Beware: your actions in the new past may butterfly-effect into someone else inventing time travel.
(Also: the story claims that this is not so much a personal eternity as a dynastical one.)
u/CCC_037 [+2] (a day later)
Since the universe still exists when you first travel through time, you know that your use of time travel is the first instance of it in that loop.
You do not. Your universe may be the result of a (successful) attempt at time travel starting from either before or after your attempt (if it was 'before', then the other traveller changed time so as to prevent his own time travel; but something you do might change it back).
u/None [+2] (a day later)
True. Although it just occurred to me that you don't have to go back to just before you invented time travel. You could go as far back as you like so long as you're still in a time when you could theoretically build the time machine, and just make sure to always build it before it's even conceivable that someone else would.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (a day later)
That is impossible. There may be another time traveller, who came from a time contemporary to yours - once you can build the machine, it is conceivable that the other time traveller can build the machine. Worse yet, after your first one or two times round the loop, the "other time traveller" is you (unless you continually and deliberately overwrite your past self).
You might be able to build it before it's conceivable that anyone else on Earth could invent time travel from scratch; but you're not guaranteed that that's going to be enough.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
It's possible that another time traveller is there, but since the traveller didn't build the machine in your originating loop then unless your actions change things the traveller won't build it. And there won't be any "unpredictable" travellers from the previous loop because the fact that you still existed to build the machine means that nobody else time traveled.
u/CCC_037 [+2] (a day later)
It's possible that another time traveller is there, but since the traveller didn't build the machine in your originating loop then unless your actions change things the traveller won't build it.
True. However, "your actions change things" might mean "the other time traveller discovers your existence, and decides to, so to speak, shoot first".
And there won't be any "unpredictable" travellers from the previous loop because the fact that you still existed to build the machine means that nobody else time traveled.
No, it means that anyone else who did time travel must have changed history in such a way as to prevent their own time travel. Or time travelled from a far earlier timeline, far in your future. While it is true that they won't time travel without a causal chain of events that leads back to your own actions, there's no telling which action (or lack of action) on your part might trigger that causal chain of events.
And then, of course, there's the point that you would have to time travel before your previous-loop-self, or you might end up trapping the universe in a steady-state infinite loop...
u/chaos-engine [+2] (2 days later)
You can take it to the extreme. If you can control who's brain you enter when you loop back, you can keep looping back over and over again until you have taken over envy soul in humanity, and then continue taking humanity and all you clones down whichever route you chose.
You'll also get to be the first person to be their own mother, father, and child.
u/thrawnca [+5] Carbon-based biped (4 hours later)
Shouldn't it be 'Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V'? In all my experience, Ctrl-Z is Undo.
u/ednever [+3] (4 hours later)
Good catch. Thank you
u/ednever [+2] (19 hours later)
Fixed
u/thrawnca [+4] Carbon-based biped (4 hours later)
I didn't understand the "alien-Mormons" reference, probably because I'm a Mormon myself and don't see how the context applies; can someone elaborate?
u/ednever [+6] (16 hours later)
Changed to Amish.
u/ednever [+3] (4 hours later)
Mormon may or have been the right choice.
It was meant to say "Even if the entire species decides to leave the universe, some subgroup in the species likely won't." Mormons are a big, well known group in the US that have distinct enough beliefs that if the rest of society decided to do something, they might decide not to as a cohesive group.
u/Roxolan [+12] Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager (4 hours later)
Amish would make more sense.
u/thrawnca [+3] Carbon-based biped (5 hours later)
Ah, thanks.
The origin and headquarters of the church are in the US, but there are actually more Mormons in other countries now.
u/Gurkenglas [+3] (15 hours later)
The same reasoning that you use against global warming being the filter seems to refute your hypothesis.
u/ednever [+3] (16 hours later)
Can you expand on that? I don't follow the reasoning.
u/None [+4] (18 hours later)
Rather than explain his reasoning, I suggest you read David Brin's Existence. It covers the Great Filter and various responses to it as its major theme.
u/ednever [+6] (19 hours later)
Just purchased. Thanks.
u/Gurkenglas [+3] (17 hours later)
Some alien civilisation should have been able to refrain from groundhogging itself out of existence. Imagine any lifeform that could evolve, that wouldn't have problems coordinating. Perhaps a species whose members can exchange thoughts, where at some point during their civilation's history everyone became a hivemind? "Nobody presses the starsystem-nuke button on the back of their hand" isn't enough of a great filter.
u/Bowbreaker [+1] Solitary Locust (a day later)
All you need is another species somewhere else in the universe to invent time travel before your hypothetical time travel avoiding species is advanced enough to encounter them. And if the chance for such a species developing is small enough to almost always coincide with a more "typical" reset species and thus be disrupted at whatever point is critical for it to form then it might just not have happened yet. Or not happen ever before the heat death of the universe.
u/Gurkenglas [+1] (a day later)
That species is irrelevant. When it resets, it rewinds any progress it made, and any progress the rare species made, but it'll also reset any extinction events the rare species encounters, while it won't reset any extinction events that hit itself. When it finally succumbs to something, the rare species is still out there with its linear-time chance at space colonization.
u/Bowbreaker [+1] Solitary Locust (2 days later)
Not if the reset jumps to before whatever random event allowed the rare species to exist in the first place.
u/Gurkenglas [+1] (2 days later)
Such a reset is as able to bring a rare species into existence as out of. It preserves the probability of such a species existing when the universe finally reaches 15 billion years of age.
u/Bowbreaker [+1] Solitary Locust (3 days later)
You're right. My math/logic was off.
u/awesomeideas [+3] Dai stiho, cousin. (21 hours later)
Well, I know I'd send a few hundred more of me back than just one the first time.
u/CCC_037 [+1] (a day later)
But as soon as you send the first one, there's no 'you' to do the sending anymore...
u/Bowbreaker [+3] Solitary Locust (a day later)
I posted this as a reply to someone else but I want to see what you have to say about it:
If the chance for a species to go extinct after the invention of radio is substantial enough compared to the chance that it goes extinct before the invention of radio then shouldn't the universe still be filled with alien radio signals despite tie travel stopping every species from passing the last great filter?
u/Nighzmarquls [+2] (14 hours later)
I find it interesting this paper got posted almost at the same time I finished implementing the first stage of a multiplayer time travel mechanic in one of my indie game projects.
u/ednever [+3] (14 hours later)
Board game or RPG?
I'm fascinated by board game time travel mechanics, but haven't found one I liked yet (my wife loves Temporum, but I find it a little too simple. Variation looks high, but it isn't really. And can't be if the game is to work every time it's played)
u/Nighzmarquls [+1] (a day later)
It uses board game style mechanics, but I use a computer to do the book keeping.
So my next prototype is meant to be something like a chess match, but every piece moves simultaneously.
Is as difficult to 'kill' as the king in chess.
And you play it by controlling an individual piece on your side until it is taken, then starting over from the start of the match with a new piece.
u/xamueljones [+2] My arch-enemy is entropy (5 days later)
That's a fascinating idea! But what determines the behavior of the pieces that the player hasn't controlled yet? I mean how will those pieces move? Because it feels as if that is a fairly arbitrary decision to make which could completely shape the entire game.
u/Nighzmarquls [+1] (5 days later)
For the first prototype the answer is they don't move beyond player action.
As I expand the system there will be more and more forms of 'AI' in place by default that give things a default behavior that you can later end up changing.
u/earnestadmission [+2] Singular "they" user (14 hours later)
I think there's an inconsistency in your proposal. The Drake equation asks why we do not now see more signs of alien life. You propose that time travel resets technological progress. But, the reset is universal (you talk about killing all of the aliens when resetting the time back to the mid 21st century).
This does not answer why we don't see any evidence of aliens as of the date of your reset. Any aliens have been reset to where they were, leaving the question of the Great Filter unresolved. As I see it, this proposal would require that either we are the first developed species, or that aliens have all fallen to the Great filter. That is, the same situation before introducing time travel.
u/Nighzmarquls [+4] (14 hours later)
It is a proposal for why every alien would fall to this great filter. And that the great filter is time travel.
Effectively it proposes time travel is so much easier to discover then interstellar travel.
And it has universe spanning reach to reset a species.
So the end state of the universe is that time travel deletes civilizations eventually, and doing so makes it like they never were interstellar in the first place.
u/ednever [+5] (16 hours later)
Exactly. Thank you for clarifying.
u/ednever [+5] (14 hours later)
It's about timing. The reason the Drake equation / Fermi Paradox results in a high probability of aliens in that you need to believe the average lifespan of aliens able to communicate will be very high.
If you assume the average lifespan of communicative aliens is say 200 years before they go extinct then the rest of the assumptions can be reasonable and you can assume you are the only living intelligent species in the galaxy.
The re-set just makes it highly likely that species will not last anything close to 200 years in the "final" timeline.
(The chances that two species are close to inventing time travel at exactly the same time is very very small, but it doesn't really change things - just makes the modeling much more complicated)
u/earnestadmission [+4] Singular "they" user (15 hours later)
The re-set just makes it highly likely that species will not last anything close to 200 years in the "final" timeline.
No.
The reset is more influential than that. The reset says that the time state of the universe will not count past the first species to develop the ability to time travel. The reset of state is painted as universal; a time-reset in Alpha Centauri resets the entire universe. So the universal time clock wont pass the first development of time travel (we'd keep getting sent back to the earliest time-traveller's reversion point).
But based on the anthropic principle, earth exists and so we know the universe counts at least 13 billion years from the big bang. Thus, we can conclude that one of the following is true:
- Earth is the first place time-travel develops
- Earth's development happens within the time-loop of some other civilization.
As far as I can tell, the story has an additional unstated assumption that every sapient technological civilization will develop time travel ("easier than space flight").
Now, option (1) seems to fall within the already stated boundaries of the Fermi Paradox: Why is earth the first place to develop sapient life?
Option (2) is more interesting, but seems to require that all other civilizations have roughly equivalent technological progress to us: their time-resets happen after ours.
u/ednever [+9] (16 hours later)
You are half-way correct.
The first species develops time travel and keeps re-setting until they don't use time travel (likely due to an extinction event before the invention of time travel), then THAT timeline continues until the next species develops time travel. And it repeats.
So the reason we don't see any space-faring civilizations is the final timeline we exist in they have all destroyed themselves (If they haven't it's not the final timeline)
u/RMcD94 [+9] (16 hours later)
No, he's saying that any time there is a time reset there is a 0.0001% chance the civilization will die before inventing time travel.
Ergo, every civilization destroys itself, then no one can travel back in time, and the universe progresses. If humanity explored the entire galaxy they would find millions of civilizations who died at some point before time travel
u/ednever [+5] (19 hours later)
Exactly. Yes. Thank you for clarifying.
u/earnestadmission [+3] Singular "they" user (20 hours later)
Thanks. I was taking for granted that the time-shifted mind retains the knowledge and ability to immediately time-travel again, while ignoring infrastructure and logistics.
u/Bowbreaker [+2] Solitary Locust (a day later)
But all you need for there to be evidence of aliens is that enough civilizations go extinct before time travel but after the radio. If the chance for that is large enough then the universe should be filled with alien radio signals.
u/BadGoyWithAGun [+1] (a day later)
ELI5 why this form of time travel is considered morally negative as opposed to morally neutral. I'm not seeing the comparison to genocide.