We are still alone in the Universe, and the riddle of the Fermi paradox by no means wants to be solved. Meanwhile, a new hypothesis has arisen within the scientific community, promising to answer the question of "where the hell are all the aliens?" According to her, "everything is very simple": highly developed civilizations do exist, but they decided to put themselves in a state of hibernation and are now waiting for the change of the space age, when they can be reborn and regain their dominant position in the Universe.
The universe that we observe now was not the same billions of years ago and will not be the same as it is now, after a few more billion years. The results of the study, accepted for publication in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, suggest that the state of our present Universe could be too uncomfortable for civilizations that have entered a new stage of their evolution and reached a technological singularity. going into the state of computerized entities. It's too hot for them. And hibernation, as one of the ways to cope with the high temperature, could be the most optimal means for survival for them until the moment when space becomes much colder in the far, distant future. When stellar objects become more diffuse in the Universe,information processes will be able to proceed much faster and with a higher level of efficiency, allowing advanced civilizations to achieve much more than would be possible under current cosmological conditions.
Wait, digital aliens? Exactly. More and more futurists, astrobiologists and experts from the SETI Institute are beginning to lean towards the idea that the most logical way to transition to a new branch of evolution for advanced civilizations (we are talking about you and me, by the way) may be the transition to a digital form of existence. Living as postbiological digital entities within very powerful supercomputers will require unhindered access to powerful and efficient digital processing tools. This form of being even has its own name - "datatism".
However, as Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong and Milan Tsirkovich point out in their work published in the journal JBIS, high-speed information processes come at a price, especially when it comes to systems whose operation is directly dependent on the temperature of the environment. Computer specialists are well aware that the potential for the speed of information processes increases with decreasing temperature. In turn, cooling very powerful computer systems requires colossal energy costs. Proceeding from this, Sandberg and his colleagues believe that for highly developed, computerized civilizations, the decision in favor of saving resources during this era would be more logical than their unreasonable expenditure. They have virtually hibernated and are waiting for the universe to get much colder than it is now to awaken again.
The current temperature of the background radiation from the universe is approximately 3 degrees Kelvin. For us it may seem unbearable cold, but for a computerized civilization it can be unbearable heat. According to experts, in trillions of years, when the cosmic background radiation practically disappears due to the expansion of the Universe and the disappearance of most stars, the speed of information processes in such an environment will become 1030 orders of magnitude higher than now.
“Perhaps a highly developed civilization explored the entire area of the Universe available to it, did what is possible with the current state of the environment, and the only thing left for it at the moment is to do its own 'intracultural' affairs,” Sandberg says in his blog.
“These cases may be related to information processes. If they want to maximize their effectiveness, then it would be best to do this not now, but wait for the cold future to arrive, when much more can be done. In their place, I would go into hibernation."
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If this hypothesis is correct, very ancient extraterrestrial civilizations exist, then most likely they have already explored most of the galaxy, so we do not see them. It is quite possible that we generally live in a region of space, which by galactic standards is the "property" of one of these civilizations. But even so, then, according to Sandberg, we should have already discovered at least signs of the existence of one of these dormant civilizations.
“The clues to look for is a suspicious lack of processes that consume the enormous resources needed to keep the hibernation process running smoothly,” continues Sandberg.
In other words, the researcher wants to say that we should look for processes that prevent various natural astrophysical phenomena. For example, maybe somewhere there are stars whose mass does not convert into energy, stars whose evolutionary transition into black holes is blocked by something, galactic winds that lose some of their strength and gas in intergalactic space, the absence of collision of galaxies and separation of galaxy clusters due to the expansion of the universe. At the moment, we do not observe forces that could prevent such events, and, according to Sandberg, scientists should look out for unusual areas in which these natural cosmological processes can significantly slow down.
There is another potential way to discover dormant civilizations. It is both more futuristic and radical and dangerous at the same time.
“We could try to become the initiators of some processes that, if not“upset”, then definitely can irritate such sleeping civilizations. For example, launch myriads of self-healing and interchangeable probes to all corners of the universe,”Sandberg says.
“In the place of such a civilization, which decided to go into hibernation, I would first create defense systems that could, in case of critical danger, be connected to solving the problem. These are the protection systems we could find. I understand the idea for testing a hypothesis is very risky."
A hypothetical megastructure created by an alien civilization
The hibernation hypothesis, which attempts to explain the Fermi Paradox - the mystery of why we still haven't found any signs of alien life - is not without its flaws. David Brin, an astrophysicist, an expert at the SETI Institute, and also a futurist, believes that although the work of Sandberg and his comrades is very romantic, smart, not devoid of meaning in many places and full of various details, it still has several critical mistakes.
"It's like learning how to build more powerful, faster spaceships that can outperform previous years' models, but still create just one."
“It's the same with computing processes. You've created a super fast computer. But suddenly they decided to wait for colder times and at the same time ignore the opportunity to do so many things while the universe remains warm."
Sandberg, in turn, counters that not everything is so simple and even such an overdeveloped civilization will not be able to keep up with two birds with one stone.
“Let's say you have access to a limited budget (energy in our case) and you are passionate about how you want to buy yourself a cake. Christmas Eve. The prices are crazy. But in a few days the prices for cakes will drop significantly."
“Everything, of course, depends on your level of desire, but if you want to buy a very large cake, you will most likely wait until the price for it is as low as possible. You can spit on everything and … "hey, walk, walk like that!" But in this case, you will not go far. Buy not a whole cake, but a maximum piece of it."
According to Sandberg, such civilizations will definitely not be able to improve their computational efficiency in this era. Even if we take into account that some super-developed computerized civilization decides to do this in the present, using all available resources, this will mean that to support its existence in the future it will have much less of these same resources.
But Brin does not give up and says that the "strategy of hibernation for survival" in itself is too dangerous.
"If you just ignore the laws of the physical world for the sake of datatism, then one day this very reality can bite you hard while you sleep and dream of a more wonderful computerized future," says Brin.
In his opinion, it cannot be ruled out that equally advanced opportunistic aliens who have decided not to choose the path of dataism will be able to penetrate all the security means of those in hibernation and cause a real apocalypse for the latter.
It's funny, but Sandberg himself is not fanatical about his own hypothesis of hibernation, but believes that it would be interesting to investigate such a possibility.
"If you are a scientist and decide to immediately abandon your least probable hypothesis, then you are no scientist," Sandberg says flatly.
At the same time, in his opinion, the strategy of hibernation cycles may also become our choice in a few billion years.
“I think, whatever the answer to the Fermi paradox, we are really alone and ourselves responsible for the future of this Universe, intelligent life is always doomed, and maybe the aliens are really here, or we just made a mistake in something very fundamental,” he will be shocking to us anyway. But the search for this answer can take a very long time."
NIKOLAY KHIZHNYAK