Post

Asa ⭔
@asa.engineer

this is roughly one possible interpretation of the Fermi paradox. what if other intelligent thinking beings are out there but operate on a very different timescale? what if their speech-cycles are a millisecond, or a millennium, and we're either missing them or mistaking them for static equilibrium

Axe Ghost. On Steam!@axeghostgame.bsky.social

The only reason why people can think a brain is "thinking" is because of the illusion of an instantaneous response. If people performed the same neural state changes over a few centuries using paper & pen, at no point in time would anybody believe there is thinking going on.

6 reposts41 likes

Jonathan Stray
@jonathanstray.com

Possible, but unlikely. There are characteristic time scales that life needs to respond to. Below milliseconds you run into physical limits like the rate of diffusion and reaction. Above decades you're too slow to react to the environment. We can have fleas and trees, but not much beyond those.

sawawawawa
@sawawawawa3.bsky.social

My hypothesis is that if there is life on Venus, it has to look something like the silicate clay proposed and even then it will only be found in certain parts of the atmosphere on Venus

norvid_studies
@norvid-studies.bsky.social

that's a good point and also physical engineering on the scale of kardashev civilizations will show up as unusual whatever the time scale the computation (or biological life) is operating on

Asa ⭔
@asa.engineer

I think that's true of anything resembling metabolic life as we know it, but may not hold for hypothetical electronic, or planet-scale, or other very different intelligences.

aria
@aurelium.me

i've always felt like the fermi paradox just kind of didn't need solving it was based on an assumption that apparent RF emissions from earth would continue increasing when, in fact, the opposite has happened

aria
@aurelium.me

if you had an exact clone of the solar system, humans and all, from the year 2026 positioned 10ly away and angled just right, I think we might *maybe* detect that it has oxygen if the angle isn't just right, we might not see it at all. and we've only found around 5000 stars with exoplanets!

Jo Wynter
@jowynter.bsky.social

Hey space guys, we been sending out radio signals for 'years' (Hitler, sorry about that). We sent you the golden record with Chuck Berry and everything... Why haven't you responded? Fermi Paradox, lol...

Derridon't
@derridont.bsky.social

Not gonna lie, I think the fact that it would take *centuries* to accomplish by hand actually makes it seem more like thinking to me? Highlightinf how unfathomably vast the computation behind it really is makes "it's 'just' math" feels a lot less substantial. Centuries of math is *a lot* of math

bowind.bsky.social
@bowind.bsky.social

Pretty unlikely solution imo. The speed of human thought is largely shaped by how fast we need to respond to our environment. I can't imagine any heavily interactive environment being much slower or faster. The evolutionary forces for the slower one would also take a lot more time