No one really considering this properly thinks it will be a single species or empire colonising the galaxy. I think the word "conquer" is throwing people off. Colonising the galaxy would be like how life "conquered" the Earth.
Fermi paradox isn't about invasion of us currently. It's asking why Aliens didn't colonise the solar system while dinosaurs were still walking around. Like this says it would take 1 billion to take over the galaxy, technological civilisations could have existed already for multiple times that amount.
If you have machines that can self replicate but not perfectly, you have natural selection. Which is a scary thought as you'r going to then have ones that multiply faster than the original be successful.
Yh, to assume that other life-forms would exhibit the same colonial tendencies is ignorant.
Wow, I can't believe people on this site would wish bad things on Bezos. Sure, he's made billions off of the backs of his overworked employees with shitty working conditions, but have some civility.
I certainly hope we grow out of this nonsense before we go interstellar.
Life on Earth is at least 3.5 billion years old, maybe 4 billion. Multicellular maybe 2 billion, animals 660 million, 300 million for mammals. And we've had civilisation for 8k years while being around for 300k.
There's no limit on the amount of error correction you can build in, it's just going to make it more complex.
Oil and Gas do not come from dead Dinosaurs, they mostly come from plant matter that would occur naturally with or without an apocalyptic event.
People are just mad that ferns aren't getting the credit they deserve.
I'm of the belief that once you've mastered technology to a point, you realize how pointless expansion is and instead turn inward. Unlock and digitize the soul to become a part of a massive species-wide collective inside an eternal digital heaven. Expansion in the physical space is generally only to acquire more resources anyways - once you figure that out who needs it anymore.
I think that's relying on presuming all aliens would think like us. An alien evolutionary history could lead to something with a radically different cognition and outlook. So a more inward looking approach or living digitally might just not be appealing to some, or even occur to them. Like if you're already an immortal biological hive mind what even is turning inward? Or why even think of going digital?
Most precursor races in scifi are dumb fucks that screw themselves over. So it fits.
With the way light travels and works we could look at a far away planet that has intelligent life right now. But because we are technically looking into the past, we could have no idea.
Yeah this is what I'm thinking. It's ridiculously hard to get organic life to even unite over the most basic things on the same planet so conquering a galaxy following ideals set fourth millions of years ago to your ancestors doesn't seem really feasible. But machines are the perfect candidate for this type of strategy to blindly follow programming. It is completely possible to build such a machine with the right technology not too far off our own, so why hasn't it been detected by us yet?
