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posted by janrinok on Wednesday June 06 2018, @10:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the own-worst-enemy dept.

"Alexander Berezin, a theoretical physicist at the National Research University of Electronic Technology in Russia, has proposed a new answer to Fermi's paradox — but he doesn't think you're going to like it. Because, if Berezin's hypothesis is correct, it could mean a future for humanity that's 'even worse than extinction.'

'What if,' Berezin wrote in a new paper posted March 27 to the preprint journal arxiv.org, 'the first life that reaches interstellar travel capability necessarily eradicates all competition to fuel its own expansion?'" foxnews.com/science/2018/06/04/aliens-are-real-but-humans-will-probably-kill-them-all-new-paper-says.html

In other words, could humanity's quest to discover intelligent life be directly responsible for obliterating that life outright? What if we are, unwittingly, the universe's bad guys?

And if you are not sure what the Fermi paradox is then the link should help, and there is a long explanation of that one in the article.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @03:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 06 2018, @03:54PM (#689354)

    But even if first-is-final, why are we just on ONE planet so far? An average sample of "intelligent ponderers" would put such a ponderer in a fully populated universe, or at least a big corner of it. Oneness violates the Copernican Principle which assumes we are not in a unique or special position/condition. But this actual "edge case" suggests there is another kind of filter in play. Maybe AI bots are the likely future incarnation of an intelligent species (or works), and expanding bots are not likely to be philosophical ponderers, but rather purpose-built.

    This implies independent ponderers are rare and get replaced by alternative powers either way.

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