3. My solution to the Fermi Paradox and the location of the Great Filter

My solution to the Fermi Paradox and the location of the Great Filter

Or... We have a clear path ahead of us towards a machine and machine/human hybrid intelligence explosion. AI designing AI that then designs AI and so on, co-incident with brain-machine interfaces undergoing a similar rapid bootstrapping of capability. Pretty much any field of endeavor where this surplus of future brain power can benefit will be dragged along for the ride also.

Assuming we're fairly typical then this could well be how evolution pans out for any species that seeks to leave their home star system. The benefits of advancing computation are too seductive to bypass.

If you look at the extremely accurate progression graphs that track processor density vs neuron density against time there's a rapid acceleration that is beginning to take place that will result in machine minds that are trillions of times more powerful than a human mind.

This is all just science fiction hand-waving, but to me, given that a blue-green water world is perfectly detectable from almost anywhere in this galaxy by a civilization at our level or above, and that our world has been detectable for billions of years, we could be reasonably assumed to have been detected by now. If post singularity machine civilizations are in existence, and the evolutionary benefits of becoming one seem so strong I think its probable they do, then they could well be here.

As for the whole why haven't they said hello yet, if anyone is out there they either already got here and we didn't exist yet, or they are still on their way here and yet to arrive, or they are here now and we're not that interesting to talk to yet - the factor by which a machine intelligence's processor density outstrips that of a human brain within just a few decades of it's creation is a couple of orders of magnitude greater than the difference between our brains and a jellyfish. Our minds are just over a 100 million times more complex than a jellyfish's 800 neurons. We have accurate models that predict the emergence of machines that will be trillions of times more complex that our brains are now. If that's true, and if something like that is here now observing us, we're about as interesting right now as a tidal pool full of paramecium. In 50 years however, once the we join the giant machine-brain club, different story.

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