Answer the Fermi paradox without saying anything about interstellar travel

The observable universe is huge, the possible universe is even bigger than that.
Our radio waves haven't even reached 1% of the observable universe, let alone the possible universe and we also haven't even observed a fraction of that.
Us making claims about, or against the existence of aliens, is utterly pointless pseudoscience.
The least you can say is that extraterrestrial life probably exists, intelligent extraterrestrial life is doubtful and ever seeing complex extraterrestrial life in person is extremely unlikely.
Once again, the universe is intangibly massive.

the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

>without saying anything about interstellar travel.

>But muh paradox from an irrelevant 50's physicist!

I don't know if it's fair to call Fermi 'irrelevant'

How about a "strong" mediocrity principle? That is to say, humans aren't just average, but we're EXTREMELY average. Every planet with life, which is common, has developed to almost exactly the same stage as us, just because all the factors (stars forming, planet cooling, life forming, evolution leading to complex intelligence, development of technology) all average out to taking around the same amount of time. Humans wouldn't be able to detect each other.

I didn't though, where did I say that?

I would wager that his highest achievement was building the first nuclear reactor. Basically, at his peak, he built a hot water heater.

it was implied

Implication isn't explicit though, not provable.
Checkmate, I do believe.

Maybe I'm just cynical, but I've always figured that post-radio civilizations demolish themselves within a couple thousand years at most. If that's true then statistically speaking the likelihood of any civilization developing at the right time to receive transmissions from another would pretty low, and chance that messages could be returned would be even lower, although I suppose two-way communication wouldn't really be necessary to resolve the basic question.

We aren't very good at detecting other civilizations, like we couldn't even detect radio signals coming from the nearest star system. Other ways of detecting civilizations would require them to have built some huge dyson swarm or something, which just may not be feasible at all.

That’s my thought as well.

Anthropic principle. If we had met aliens they would have killed us all.

>aliens get to a certain level of consciousness that forces them to leave developing cultures alone to grow on their own resources

>aliens have visited us already and the people they talk to dont tell the rest of us

>we get visited all the time, but their technology allows them to hide out of sight of our instruments

>theres an agreed-upon reason in some sort of alien group never to go to earth

>earth is quarantined from other lifeforms for some reason

Answer 3 + 5 without using 5.

3+1+4

Right, but you'd need an organic mechanism of some sort to craft tools. That's a universal law.

Possibility: Intelligent life is just rare AF.

Possibility: It's fairly common, but we're out here in the sparsely populated boondocks of this far arm of the galaxy, while all the real action is going on closer to the densely populated center, too far away for us to see.

Possibility: Biological immortality, or near to, is inevitably discovered before a species can terraform planets in its own system (mind, that's not "interstellar"), which in turn leads to an inevitable population cap, or prompt extinction, as the species burns through the resources of the biosphere it is trapped within in short order. Once this cap is established, there's much less motivation to expand.

Possibility: Every species that becomes sufficiently advanced builds a particle collider capable of measuring the top quark, finds it is unstable, and thus discovers we are living in a doomed false vacuum. These species escape inevitable extinction by escaping into a pocket universe. There's a slight risk that other species doing the same will interfere with their escape mechanism, so they don't leave notes behind to warn others.

Possibility: We live in a simulation designed to re-create the galactic alt-history of a specific species under the premise as to what would have happened if they never had contact with another civilization as part of an isolation experiment.

...there's others, but I'd actually have to mention interstellar travel - which is kinda of an odd request, as if there is no interstellar travel, there is no Fermi paradox.

The Dark Forest. p sick book.

>without saying anything about interstellar travel
>if there is no interstellar travel, there is no Fermi paradox.
This... The whole premise of the Fermi paradox is that some species bent on infinite expansion should have colonized the whole galaxy by now. No interstellar travel = no Fermi paradox. (Though I tend to agree with the biological immortality possibility []
, though possibility #1 seems more likely.)

It's not about the lack of radio signals, because pic related is actually an extreme exaggeration, when you take inverse square into account. The lack of Dyson spheres is stupid, because Dyson spheres are stupid, and if you aren't engaging in interstellar travel, seems you'd be much less apt to need them.

First off, excellent post.

>Wouldn't a species with enough scientific curiosity that it develops the technology necessary to reach biological immortality still want to explore the cosmos around it?

>Why would a sentient alien species not want to warn other sentient life in the universe about the imminent collapse of the false vacuum if there is one?

Alternate possibility: eventually intelligent aliens run an experiment in a particle collider that, through some mechanism that isn't common enough that it happens in nature through cosmic rays, spawns negatively charged strangelets that are long lived/in a dense enough environment that they turn their home planet into a smoldering mass of strange matter a la an ice nine scenario. This has the added benefit of explaining the paucity of antimatter in the universe given the positively charged ground state of naturally generated strangelets as predicted by most models.

Personally, I just think habitable planets that survive long enough to evolve life generally don't last long enough for intelligent species to arise, and those that do last a long time are generally in such low energy environments that it's evolutionarily infeasible for complex lifeforms to evolve (think underground oceans in jovian moons). Given that most stars are red dwarf stars and most planets that orbit red drawf stars in the habitable zone are tidally locked, life as we know it is probably very uncommon.

Anything about interstellar travel
Frik

Agreed. Extremely average and I would add, inevitable, for a planet in the goldilocks zone.

Noice

How is this the greatest statistical problem of all time? It's so fucking cut and dry and just matter of fact. brainlets can't into variable change

>Why would a sentient alien species not want to warn other sentient life
There's the question as to whether it would be possible. I mean there's no real conceivable way to put out a galaxy-wide warning that'd last a good long while, that wouldn't also sterilize a good portion of said galaxy (and wouldn't involve something ludicrous, like an artificial quasar). Granted, it maybe they've integrated a warning in such a way that we can't read it yet, such as a hidden message within the quantum fields themselves, that gets discovered about the same time as you're capable of measuring the top quark, as I believe a certain sci-fi used as a plot device.

You could send out self-replicating robots to build such warning signals in every solar system, but it'd take so many millions of years. It might be too late by the time they were proliferated enough to do any good, and you run the risk of such robots evolving and doing something more destructive.

And then there's the good long debate as to how likely it would be for a species to be empathetic enough towards other species to bother with the warning. It's kind of a happy accident of evolution that we give a damn about other species at all ourselves - mostly the result of a broad-based baby identification instinct. A species that had a more keen interspecies identifier - say pheromone based, might not be nearly so concerned about others not of its kind.

Does lead to the other science problem, in that while it might be possible to artificially spawn a universe, there's no currently conceivable way to transfer to said new universe - it'd instantly be moving away from this one at faster than the speed of light. Assuming cosmic censorship isn't a thing, it would also be possible to stick yourself inside a large and calm event horizon to buy yourself more time, but I couldn't bring that up without mentioning interstellar space travel. The only viable candidate nearby is Sagittarius-A, and it probably isn't calm enough.

>Wouldn't a species with enough scientific curiosity that it develops the technology necessary to reach biological immortality still want to explore the cosmos around it?
I suspect even an immortal species that caps its local population and under a million, or perhaps even just hundreds, would at least want to create similarly sized colonies in a few other systems just to avoid being wiped out by cosmological phenomenon. However, you wouldn't need more than two or three such colonies before you couldn't ensure your survival any further by making more, either outside the galaxy or universe, which may not be an option. (And again, couldn't bring it up under OP's rules.)

As for exploration, I do suspect you reach a point in predictive technology where additional exploration becomes pointless. With only four forces and a handful of particles, there's going to be a point where your natural and artificial intellect combine to make exploring the universe is a lot like "exploring" in Minecraft. Same shit made of the same blocks, everywhere you go. Once in awhile there's an out of place floating rock or a mountain with a neat hole through it, but that's about it. It may get to the point where they create artificial virtual universes with more complex laws, capable of sating their boredom, and explore those instead.

Dark forest hypothesis. Some non-zero percentage of alien civilizations are out to eliminate all possible competitors for resources and have the technology to do it. Exponential nature of technological progress means a non-threatening civilization might make the jump to a threatening one very quickly on a cosmological time-scale, so the safest course of action upon encountering such a civilization is to eliminate it. No one can trust anyone's intentions so everyone stays quiet.

>the universe becomes boring due to the same shit being everywhere

An excellent point. Maybe it’s just kind of like No Man’s Sky.

>of alien civilizations are out to eliminate all possible competitors for resources and have the technology to do it. Exponential nature of technological progress means a non-threatening civilization might make the jump to a threatening one very quickly

This. Its the Hobbesian state of nature.

Then why wouldn’t they just seed every possible habitable planet with a doomsday device that blows up when it detects technology?

>Given that most stars are red dwarf stars and most planets that orbit red drawf stars in the habitable zone are tidally locked, life as we know it is probably very uncommon.
Tidal locking is overrated. It rarely happens here, where we could actually observe it, even in the most ideal circumstances. Mercury, for instance, should be tidally locked as fuck - but isn't tidally locked at all. Venus isn't truly tidally locked, and in some sense, it's the opposite of tidally locked, as it's spinning the wrong way (albeit slowing). There's also a lot of moons so close to their parent planets they should be tidally locked, relative to their owners, yet remain some of the furthest objects from being said, often being both fast spinning and retrograde. Proto-solar system formations are a violent mess, and any collisions that happen during that time can keep things spinning for billions of years, as will any good-sized moon. Finally, if you are on a moon - you might be tidally locked to your parent, but not to the sun. ...and, as some have argued, you can still get life in tidally locked situations, and a heavy atmosphere largely counters the effect.

Bigger problem is that red dwarves are pretty active in their habitatal zones. Still, good-sized moon producing a good magnetic field, or a moon of a good-sized gas giant with a strong magnetic field (which most tend to have), or just a whole lotta water, and you're good to go.

Though, yes, even so, I think it's likely that intelligent life is just rare AF. Industrial life maybe just as rare - if you think about the amazing number of coincidences that had to come together to give us even The Renaissance, it isn't exactly inevitable that we would have had The Industrial Revolution if that had never happened. Plus, as I always say, the fact that there's only been five global extinction events here, and not five million, is pretty damned incredible.

Who says they didn't? You wouldn't wanna make it easy for primitives to find, lest they disarm it.

>That second moon in Beast Wars.

It's possible nearby alien civilizations are cavemen right now, or maybe they were advanced to about our current level but then went extinct.

they're all fuckin deaf.

What if the chance of organic life developing is simply astronomically low? Even if a planet has the right size, distance from its star, chemical make up, stable orbit etc, it can go billions of years without developing life.

As far as I know, we still have no clue what the first self replicating molecules really looked like, and how they came to be.

Maybe life showing up on earth after a measly 100 million years of having oceans is simply a freak statistical anomaly.

more likely our tech just can't detect them. the mediocrity principle is stronger than supposing we aren't making any errors

This is the grand solution to the Fermi's paradox. There's no aliens around because there's no need to wander around - it is possible to create resources out of nothing.

>Spotted the newfag

Dennis Reynolds visits Veeky Forums

Yeah, but if it's so rare it only comes together in one in 10,000 galaxies - odds are, we ain't gonna ever see it. There's only 54 galaxies in our cluster, we've got five billion years before we merge with the nearest, and by the time they all merge together, the rest of the red-shifted universe will have expanded forever beyond our reach, and even our vision.

Taking the average number of stars in each of those galaxies, being generous with the number of planets around them, even assuming life has a chance of forming at least once around every single planet, if it happens less often than 3.24x10^11/1, then we'll never see it.

Granted, those are slim odds, and the odds of it happening nowhere else in the observable universe, let alone the great unknown beyond, border on statistical insignificance, but realistically speaking, it's only this galaxy we have to worry about - it's fanciful to think of the other 53. Then, using that same generosity, the odds only have to be worse than 1 in 6 billion. ...and that's just life - let alone intelligent life.

Granted, it's all pretty meaningless, as our theories of abiogenesis are sketchy at best. I suppose some of the successful RNA generation experiments put the odds at much better than that, but we've no evidence that any of those experiments relate to what actually happened. What's worse, is the process by which we went from animal life to intelligent life is even less understood, and even from intelligent life to industrial life, while part of the historical record, is mired in controversy.

Unless, of course, teleportation style FTL is possible, then all bets are off, so much as they were ever on. Either way, ain't no one got a right to call the odds on this draw.

Every indication is that it's not rare. When the universe makes something it makes 10 billion of them. It's erroneous to assume this suddenly stops being the case for one specific phenomenon, just because we can't see it. Example: the Oumuamua comet. There was a Fermi paradox for that too, until only recently. Extrasolar objects were thought to be very common, but no one held it under as much scrutiny as ET. Why? Because we're biased creatures.

Unlimited resources don't necessarily save you from cosmic nor terrestrial disasters, nor from the curiosity required to achieve them.

You'd wanna colonize at least a few other systems to rule out the first problem - though, yeah, the second problem could eventually be nullified by the "No Man's Sky" effect by the time you achieve that.

>10 billion
How many galaxies are there again? If there's only 10 billion incidents of life in the universe, we're more forever alone than the average Veeky Forums user.

Further, extrasolar objects are thought to be so common (trillions) that they transit our solar system on a regular basis, and we've only found one so far. Extrapolate that to ET, and consider there are 10-100 other advanced civs in our galaxy, and we may as well be searching for them with binoculars.

>It's erroneous to assume this suddenly stops being the case for one specific phenomenon, just because we can't see it.
One bugger with this assumption is that all the life here is related to every other. This suggests either the odds are really, really, shit, as on this whole world, life only happened once, or the conditions just have to be very specific, and in that short window where they were, whatever microbe we're all descended from overran the planet and ate all the other instances of life.

10 billion was just a facetious number to illustrate a point obviously.

There could be an Earth like civilization in our own solar system, and we could still miss it, particularly if it was subterranean. Inverse square is kind of a bitch, and we're pretty damned blind.

We might yet find a pocket of goop with some unrelated DNA. We've found plenty of unrelated RNA.

Still the case that the odds don't even have to be lottery level bad before they're bad enough that you'll never encounter another life form not of your own making.

>Still the case that the odds don't even have to be lottery level bad before they're bad enough that you'll never encounter another life form not of your own making.
~1 in 175 million? If you're going by galaxy, yes. If you're going to solar system, no, they'd have to be much, much worse than lottery-level bad.

Create your own planet. UNLIMITED RESOURCES.

Doesn't do ya any good if you've done it near a star that's going to explode or in the path of a GRB. Eventually, ya gotta make some backup plans at other locations.

Even 1 in 175 million odds give us hundreds of civs per galaxy.

...That was my point.

Though, again, going by solar system (even more if by planet), but not if the odds are 1 in 175 million per galaxy - then yer boned.

End problem is we don't have any idea what the odds are.

Sampling size of one is a bitch.

>whatever microbe we're all descended from overran the planet and ate all the other instances of life.
There's some evidence to suggest that indeed happened, at some point... Albeit, well after life formed, but it's an explanation for one of the GEE's - that one microbe exploded into activity on the ocean floor and produced so much methane that it raised the temperature of the oceans and that in turn created a cascade event that raised the global temperature by about 10 degrees, temporarily. So it isn't unthinkable that some similar disaster may have killed all other life in the formative years.

Other possibility is that the first RNA based life that switched to DNA was just so much more efficient, some similar run-away bloom effect happened, altering the environment sufficiently to kill all the rest.

Generation ships with self-replicating probes dispatched in the millions in every direction. Doesn't matter if it takes hundreds, thousands, or millions of years. They will make contact eventually and Fermi will be BTFO. And if they don't make contact with other civilizations they'll still make contact with each other and, having been separated for millions of years, think they're making contact with non-human civilizations and Fermi will once again be BTFO. In every conceivable way, one civilization will make contact with another and Fermi will be BTFO.

>inb4 human-based lifeforms making contact with other human-based lifeforms doesn't count
Yes it does you fucking brainlet because you can't prove to me that we're not some spawn from some extraterrestrial civilization a la Prometheus.

How were the pyramids made? Why does NASA keep faking images of Earth?

I bet you have a really high IQ.

The notion that aliens don't exist somewhere in our galaxy is about as retarded as this statement:

cosmosmagazine.com/physics/universe-shouldn-t-exist-cern-physicists-conclude

>resorts to ad hominem
Try answering any of the two questions.

You just described the reason for the Fermi paradox. If any race had been bent on infinite colonization with that same methodology, with but a few million years head start on us, they should have already colonized every planet in the galaxy. There's been enough time for such a race to send ships to every star in the galaxy, even at sub-light speeds, if every colony they make repeats the process.

Though yes, there's always "lulz, we are the colonists" - but we're clearly related to everything else here going back some 2 billion years. Even if we go full ancient aliens, those were some very subtle tweaks, given all the intermediary stages and failures.

Though I still contest that infinite expansion is retarded. Life may take that mode by default, but when it comes to escaping a biosphere with that methodology, as soon as you discover extreme biological longevity - you either erase that instinct and permanently cap your per-planet population, or you die in the biosphere that birthed you as you burn it out. Life that fails to defeat that modus operandi, fails to sail among the stars.

>tfw you probably won't live to see first contact

>Life that fails to defeat that modus operandi, fails to sail among the stars.
That's pretty much a given. Everything will change once/if we discover how to extend our lives.

Mediocrity principle is probably the most valid.

I'm fond of the fact that earth-style life only came about because of utter chance.
Most life and coalesces into a layer of organic material over the surface of the planet because this is the most efficient possible state for life. This even almost happened during earth's lifespan several times but it gets averted by sheer chance. Most worlds with life will just be covered with a 5 inch thick layer of interdependent bacteria colonies.

Meh, this planet has been incredibly stable, all things considered. Really, given everything we know, there should have been thousands or millions of major extinction events, yet we've only had the five. Other planets will probably have a lot more shocks, and may be even less uniform, so it's unlikely a sphere covered with life would stay uniform for long - and indeed, in such instances where that may have happened here, it so radically changed the environment that life was forced to adapt to the new reality it created.

On the other hand, if you build up layer upon layer of such bacterial films, each learning to adapt to the layer created by the other, each layer creating its own unique environment, and all the layers eventually build up a neural network, combined a constant fuel force from the lowest decaying layers, you could just end up with Hellstar Remina.

Exponential expansion is the dumbest fucking meme every pseudo-scientist is spouting these days because they watched a Carl Sagan video once. We haven't even colonized a significant portion of earth yet, nor are there any indications we ever will.

Well, by sheer biological weight, we do collectively outweigh all the land animals that came before us combined, including the dinosaurs, and then our livestock collectively weighs even more than us. Albeit, that still pales next to the collective weight of microbes and insects, but we're already having a pretty heavy impact on the environment (climate change or not), having wiped out 50% of the land mammal species we so heavily outweigh, in just the past century, mostly by habitat alteration.

Sure, you can stick the whole population inside Texas, but it'd be dead within the week. Sure, the population growth is slowing in areas where family has become detrimental to a career, but make the generation life longer and that factor goes out the window, particularly if the fertile period increases as well.

Make us near immortal, or even just double our lifespans, and it becomes a real problem, real fast, and all evidence suggests we're much closer to that than to interstellar colonization. Even if one of the meme warp drives turns out not to be a meme, you'd have to find a near twin of the Earth. You certainly don't have time to terraform a planet and move huge swaths of the population before that becomes a factor.

Except humans are responsible for 98% of animal extinction

Well, maybe, but mostly incidentally. We still find animals cute and/or useful, and have bred those in such numbers such as the world has never seen, or likely could ever produce unaided. Another species, one not so prone to fall for "the cute", might have wiped out all other life in its native environment, and not give the slightest shit about any potential life elsewhere it doesn't identify as its own, having eliminated any potential resource reasons to keep any of it around long ago. Indeed, if anything, it seems it would be a much more likely evolutionary path to take (and might be our fate, if we find some reason to CRISPR out the "omg kewt" response.)

>Make us near immortal, or even just double our lifespans, and it becomes a real problem, real fast
Am I evil/insane because I don't feel bad about all the deaths due to things like disease, war, famine, etc.? It's not like I feel good about it, but I also see the silver lining whenever I read about some tragedy, that at least there are less humans alive in this overcrowded world.

Nah, just edgie. Not that I'm not guilty of the "anything that makes the freeway move faster" thoughts myself, from time to time.

I suppose, like most of us, Veeky Forums has stripped almost every last hope I have for humanity, but I still think we're the last and best hope for life here to expand beyond its egg in the max billion years it has left to hatch, and I'm holding onto valuing that... If barely. If we can survive, maybe we can evolve into something worthy of survival afterwards. Maybe... Possibly...
DON'T MAKE ME CRY!!

>If we can survive, maybe we can evolve into something worthy of survival afterwards.
It sounds like what you need is some singularity. Advances in medicine and science at EXPONENTIAL RATES will give you all the metahumanity you will ever need. 2029. Watch this space and save this tweet.

(You) Can Read This! Q.E.D.

It's kinda scary to think of what humanity would become if we had a singularity right now. While I'm certainly for leaving the planet before we solve all the world's problems (as I think a lot of them would be aided by doing so, and some may not be solvable without doing so), I really do hope we can resolve some of our fundamental determinants, before they become the cemented features of a virtually immortal monster race as it charges across the galaxy.

>life evolves on earth for approximately 4 billion fucking years before shitting out an ape that can ask why instead of how
Because intelligence is a fluke.
Alternatively, the galaxy and possibly the universe were created to support for some as-yet unknown purpose.

>fundamental determinants
You mean like our humanity? Let's assume we are the way we are fundamentally because of a genetic makeup that is a result of billions of years of evolution. If we start trying to improve on it by editing out genes we don't find desirable, will be humanity that leaves our star system?

Also, I'm far more confident that our choices, whether they be "good" or "bad," are essentially results of free will. That's not to say there's not some subconscious lizard brain pulling some levers (at least partially), but that even if we were to become something else, we'd still fundamentally remain the same (i.e. a lot of the time it is reasonable to be an asshole).

That is a bit of a problem, and it's difficult to sort out one problem without removing some other advantage. You, for instance, can't give up tribalism without simultaneously giving up the core mechanisms for civilization. But I'm not suggesting genetically ripping things out - that's exactly the sort of thing we'd do if we had a singularity right now, and among the reasons it sounds so disastrous to me. I hope we can instead evolve more culturally, but not at the expense of that survival effort - as it's a billion years *max*, and again, the fact that we've gone this long really is a minor miracle. So, while I don't want things to slow down, we should recognize we've already at the point where our reach exceeds our grasp.

A conservative approach to scientific advancement sounds very reasonable to me but I fear that using a metric as nebulous as "cultural evolution" to signal when it is that we are ready to do x or y is problematic to say the least. History suggests culture is at least partially a by-product of whatever incidental context exists, so it might be a waste of time to wait for some type of New Age awakening of humanity.

It's not wise to start gratuitously tearing away at our genomes, no doubt, but people aren't going to change just because you sit around and wait for them to do so. This is fundamentally my problem with democracy. That's not to say I don't think democracy is the least worst political system, but I don't think anything exceptional is predicated on anything ordinary. And the overwhelming majority of humans are average, ordinary individuals, and you and I are witnessing the world go to shit because of the average, ordinary decisions that they make as a result of democratic systems. I think what I'm trying to say is fuck the culture, or at least fuck it insofar as we need to wait around for the masses to decide to do something about the world they live in. If we're going to favor certain traits over others, why not favor certain people over others?

The tree of life is a giant mollusk?

Fermi:How come we havn't met aliens?
Answer:Space is big
That was easy

You're not going to hurt these anons, are you bro?

No, no, no... Like I said, I don't wanna slow things down, and if anything, new discoveries we've not yet made are key to that portion of our evolution - if it was something we could fix simply through talking, we woulda fixed it by now. But a singularity, right now, at this instance, while I'd take it out of desperation, would be highly regrettable. We'd definitely be the preemie baby of such civilizations, uncooked and incomplete, forever searching for that missing piece. Hopefully, we'd either find it later, borrow it from a more sensible civilization, or have it beaten into us by said... But if we are alone, and we reach an equilibrium, it might be a hole we never fill that ultimately dooms us, much like an adult who was once an abused child who missed some critical stage of development in his youth.

Still, even that beats death by cosmic golf ball.

The Monty hall problem may seem simple but there is more there than you think. Relations to quantum mechanics, AI, genetic algorithms, etc.

[math]welcome to the machine[/math]

every alien is at the same technological level as us.

I understand what it is you're arguing for but it's also pretty vague. Maybe that's all it can be at the moment. I agree that I'd like to see humanity evolve linearly but I don't know when or how we're going to know we've evolved sufficiently enough that we can now pull the strap and slingshot into the galaxy Kardashev-style. Also, perhaps you should consider that sudden changes in the velocity of our development might be a good thing in the grand scheme of things. Using your analogy of the human missing a step during his development, maybe there's something abnormal that a child can experience that will ultimately make that child better off/stronger than what they would have been had they not had such an experience.

Heh, if it was the kinda thing you could put your finger on, that didn't simply arise out of "human nature" critical to some other aspect we'd either find abhorrent to abandon, or be crippled by abandoning, they wouldn't be such hard problems.

Again, not for slowing things down in any way, but Singularity suggests post-humanism in short order, a movement so fast that we're blind to its consequences until it's come and gone with permanently transformative effects that are effectively beyond our control and dictate. You do not want a half-formed creature to make such a transformation. You do not want to turn an angsty teenage child into a god. You end up with End of Evangelion.

I mean, if such a thing had come upon us in the 11th century, the end result would probably look something like Warhammer 40k. Grimdark is all well and fun to play with as fiction, but you don't wanna live it.

(I mean, man, the heresy...)
youtube.com/watch?v=UhduvvA_Xpo
youtube.com/watch?v=IEGo41443iI

I'm not familiar with Warhammer but I understand what you mean and I agree, perhaps somewhat. Still, better safe than sorry, right? Or not. Whatever.

I WANT TO MAKE IT. I DON'T WANT TO JUST DIE HERE ON THIS ROCK. I DON'T WANT TO HAVE BEEN "BORN TOO EARLY." ... FUCK.

Well, like I said, I'd take the Singularity out of sheer desperation, if it happened, just sayin, probably be unfortunate timing in the long run. Though, unlike some people around here, I don't see it anywhere on the near horizon, though we may be on the cusp of some interesting cascades.

I'm old, so I'm not leaving the planet - just holding out hope for my great^10 grandchildren, and really, life in general. Though, if you're young, maybe there's some hope - quite a few potential cascades on the horizon for longevity.