Cool Worlds
Уровень B2· 861 слово
When it comes to life in the universe, Arthur C. Clarke once said that two possibilities exist. Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not.
Both are equally terrifying. In that vein, I want to talk to you today about what I think is perhaps one of the most disturbing calculations about our cosmos. A result so unsettling that once you see it, I don't think you're ever going to look out at space in quite the same way ever again. What we are going
to do is take a decades-old argument and extend it to cosmological scales. The original form was first formalized in the 1970s and 80s, triggered by an idea first posed by legendary physicist John von Neumann, a man decades ahead of his time. Von Neumann looked at progress in manufacturing, computing, and
he reasoned that one day technological species such as ourselves should be able to manufacture self-replicating space probes. Machines that could travel from one world to another, where they'd harvest local resources, reproduce, and then spread out to yet more worlds. [music] Known as von Neumann machines, the idea
admittedly seemed a little fantastical when he first wrote it down. But today, now it seems like a trivial extrapolation of our present-day technology, let alone an advanced civilization thousands of years ahead of us. The confluence of 3D printing, AI, and ever smaller CubeSats provides the
foundations for such a machine. And indeed, a study estimated that already such probes could plausibly replicate 70% of their mass with current technology. And that study was over 5 years ago. The economic incentives for building self-replicating probes like this are actually pretty obvious. I
mean, why bother going to the expense of building fleets of probes here on Earth and then launching them into space when you could just build one and be done [music] with it. But, if you think about it, these probes could also be incredibly dangerous. For one thing, when a von Neumann probe arrives at a
new world, it could plausibly annihilate any indigenous life forms without much thought. An analogy here would be how we don't really give a damn about anthills in our way when constructing new buildings.
>> [music] >> But subtly, any machine that self-replicates will sometimes make errors in its replication process, thereby leading to mutations just like biology. Look, whatever the original intent of its creators may be, however benevolent those designers were, deep space von Neumann probes clearly have
the potential to go off script. And these ideas have led to notions like the Berserker hypothesis, grabby aliens, and much more. Broadly, the idea that if someone, somewhere builds one of these probes, then the rest of us are all screwed. There's even been simulations of the effectiveness of anti-von Neumann
machines, probes designed to cleanse the galaxy of such threats, but even these find that it's essentially uncontrollable. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it can't be put back in.
>> Who says? Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. >> And so, the mere fact that we exist seems like contrapositive evidence to the existence of these von Neumann probes because else we wouldn't be here.
