Speculating about the diffusion of intelligent species through the galaxy, as we’ve been doing these past few posts, is always jarring. I go back to the concept of ‘deep time,’ which is forced on us when we confront years in their billions. I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me thinking on this level is closer to mathematics than philosophy. I can accept a number like 13.4 × 10⁹ years (the estimate for the age of globular cluster NGC 6397 and a pointer to the Milky Way’s age) without truly comprehending how vast it is. As biological beings, a century pushes us to the limit. What exactly is an aeon?
NGC 6397 and other globular clusters are relevant because these ancient stellar metropolises are the oldest large-scale populations in the Milky Way. But I’m reminded that even talking about the Milky Way can peg me as insufferably parochial. David Kipping takes me entirely out of this comparatively ‘short-term’ mindset by pushing the limits of chronological speculation into a future so remote that elementary particles themselves have begun to break down. Not only that – the Columbia University astrophysicist finds a way for human intelligence to witness this.
You absolutely have to see how he does this in Outlasting the Universe, a presentation on his Cool Worlds YouTube channel. Now Cool Worlds is a regular stop here because Kipping is a natural at rendering high-level science into thoughtful explanations that even the mathematically challenged like me can understand. Outlasting the Universe begins with Kipping the narrator saying “We are in what you would call the future…the deep future” and takes human evolution through the end of its biological era and into a computer-borne existence in which a consciousness can long outlive a galaxy.
Image: Astrophysicist, author and indeed philosopher David Kipping. Credit: Columbia University.
Along the way we remember (and visit in simulation) Freeman Dyson, who once speculated that to become (almost) immortal, a culture could slow down the perceived rate of time. “Like Zeno’s arrow,” says Kipping, “we keep dialing down the speed.” The visuals here are cannily chosen, the script crisp and elegant, imbued with the ‘sense of wonder’ that brought so many of us to science fiction. Outlasting the Universe is indeed science fiction of the ‘hard SF’ variety as Kipping draws out the consequences of deep time and human consciousness in ways that make raw physics ravishing. I envy this man’s students.
With scenarios like this to play with, where do we stand with the ‘zoo hypothesis?’ It must, after all, reckon with years by the billions and the spread of intelligence. Science fiction writer James Cambias responded to my Life Elsewhere? Relaxing the Copernican Principle post with a tight analysis of the notion that we may be under observation from a civilization whose principles forbid contact with species they study. This is of course Star Trek’s Prime Directive exemplified (although the lineage of the hypothesis dates back decades), and it brings up Jim’s work because he has been so persistent a critic of the idea of shielding a population from ETI contact.
Jim’s doubts about the zoo hypothesis go back to his first novel. A Darkling Sea posits an Europa-like exoplanet being studied by a star-faring species called the Sholen, who are employing a hands-off policy toward local intelligence even as they demand that human scientists on the world’s sea bottom do the same. Not long after publication of the novel (Tor, 2014), he told John Scalzi that he saw Prime Directives and such as “ …a mix of outrageous arrogance and equally overblown self-loathing, a toxic brew masked by pure and noble rhetoric.” The arrogance comes from ignoring the desires of the species under study and denying them a choice in the matter.
In a current blog post called The Zoo Hypothesis: Objections, Jim lays this out in rousing fashion:
…we deduce that you can’t hide a star system which contains a civilization capable of large-scale interstellar operations, which the Zookeepers are by definition. They’re going to be emitting heat, EM radiation, laser light, all the spoor of a Kardashev Type I or higher civilization. And the farther away they are, the more they’re going to be emitting because they need to be bigger and more energy-rich in order to have greater reach.
This gives us one important lesson: if the goal of a Zoo is to keep the civilizations inside from even knowing of the existence of other civilizations, the whole thing is impossible. You can’t have a Zoo without Zookeepers, and the inhabitants of the Zoo will detect them.
Jim’s points are well-taken, and he extends the visibility issue by noting that we need to address time, which must be deep indeed. For a civilization maintaining all the apparatus of a protected area around a given star has to do so on time frames that are practically geological in length. Here we can argue a bit, for a ‘zoo’ set up for reasons we don’t understand in the first place might well come into existence only when the species being studied has reached the capability of detecting its observers.
I referenced Amri Wandel (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) on this the other day. Wandel argues that our own industrial lifespan is currently on the order of a few centuries, and who knows what level of technological sophistication a ‘zoo-keeping’ observer culture might want us to reach before it decides it can initiate contact? That would drop the geological timeframe down to a more manageable span, although the detectability problem still remains. So does the issue of interaction with other star-faring species who might conceivably need to be warned off entering the zoo. Cambias again:
If Captain Kirk or whoever shows up on your planet and says “I’m from another planet. Let’s talk and maybe exchange genetic material — or not, if you want me to leave just say so,” that’s an infinitely more reasonable and moral act than for Captain Kirk to sneak around watching you without revealing his own existence. The first is an interaction between equals, the second is the attitude of a scientist watching bacteria. Is that really a moral thing to do? Why does having cooler toys than someone else give you the right to treat them like bacteria?
This is lively stuff, and speculation of this order is why many people begin reading and writing science fiction in the first place. A hard SF writer, a ‘world builder,’ will make sure that he or she has thought through implications for every action he attributes not only to his characters but the non-human intelligences they may interact with. One thing that had never occurred to me was the issue of visibility when translated to the broader galaxy. Because a zoo needs to be clearly marked. Here’s Jim’s view:
If you’re going to exclude other civilizations from a particular region of the Galaxy, you have to let them know. Shooting relativistic projectiles or giant laser beams at incoming starships is a very ham-fisted way of communicating “keep out!” — and it runs the risk of convincing the grabby civilization that you’re shooting at to start shooting back. And if they’re grabby and control a lot of star systems, that’s going to be a lot of shooting.
Jim’s points are telling, and the comments on my recent Centauri Dreams posts also reflect readers’ issues with the zoo hypothesis. My partiality to it takes these issues into account. If the zoo hypothesis is the best of the solutions to the Fermi question, then the likelihood that other intelligent species are in our neighborhood is vanishingly small. Which lets me circle back to the paper by Ian Crawford and Dirk Schulze-Makuch that set off this entire discussion. It asked, you’ll recall, whether the zoo hypothesis wasn’t the last standing alternative to the idea that technological civilizations are, at the least, rare. It’s not a good alternative, but there it is.
In other words, I’d like the zoo hypothesis to have some traction, because it’s the only way I can find to imagine a galaxy in which intelligent civilizations are common.
Consider the thinking of Crawford and Schulze-Makuch on other hypotheses. Interstellar flight might be impossible for reasons of distance and energy, but this seems a non-starter given that we know of ways within known physics to send a payload to another star even in this century. A slow exploration front moving at Voyager speeds could do the trick in a fraction of the time available given the age of the Milky Way. The lack of SETI detections likewise points to technologies that are physically feasible (various kinds of technosignatures) but are not yet observed.
Is the answer that civilizations don’t live very long, and the chances of any two existing at the same brief time in the galaxy are remote? The nagging issue here is that we would have to assume that all civilizations are temporally limited. It takes only one to find a way through whatever ‘great filter’ is out there and survive into a star-faring maturity to get the galaxy effectively visited and perhaps colonized by now. Crawford and Schulze-Makuch reject models that result in volumes of the galactic disk being unvisited during the four billion years of Earth’s existence, considering them valid mathematically but implausible as solutions to the larger Fermi puzzle.
Many of the hypotheses to explain the Great Silence go even further into the unknowable. What, for example, do we make of attempts to parse out an alien psychology, which inevitably is seen, wittingly or not, as reflecting our own human instincts and passions? Monkish cultures that choose not to expand for philosophical reasons will remain unknowable to us, for example, as will societies that self-destruct before they achieve interstellar flight. We can still draw a few conclusions, though, as Crawford and Schulze-Makuch do, all pointing at least to intelligence being rare.
Although we know nothing of alien sociology, it seems inevitable that the propensity for self-destruction, interstellar colonization and so on must be governed by probability distributions of some kind. The greater the number of ETIs that have existed over the history of the Galaxy, the more populated will be the non-self-destructed and/or pro-colonization wings of these distributions, and it is these ETIs that we do not observe. On the other hand, if the numbers of ETIs have always been small, these distributions will have been sparsely populated and the non-observation of ETIs in their expansionist wings follows naturally.
Image: Are ancient ruins the only thing we may expect to find if we reach other star systems? Are civilizations always going to destroy themselves? The imposing remains of Angkor Wat. Credit: @viajerosaladeriva.
Likewise, we still face the problem that, as Stapledon long ago noted, different cultures will choose different priorities. Why assume that in a galaxy perhaps stuffed with aliens adopting Trappist-like vows of silence there will not be a few societies that do want to broadcast to the universe, a METI-prone minority perhaps, but observable in theory. We have no paradox in the Fermi question if we assume that aliens are rare, but if they are as common as early science fiction implied, the paradox is only reinforced.
So Crawford and Schulze-Makuch have boiled this down to the zoo hypothesis or nothing, with the strong implication that technological life must indeed be rare. I rather like my “one to ten” answer to the question of how many technological species are in the galaxy, because I think it squares with their conclusions. And while we can currently only speculate on reasons for this, it’s clear that we’re on a path to draw conclusions about the prevalence of abiogenesis probably in this century. How often technologies emerge after unicellular life covers a planet is a question that may have to wait for the detection of a technosignature. And as is all too clear, it’s possible this will never come.
The paper is Crawford & Schulze-Makuch, “Is the apparent absence of extraterrestrial technological civilizations down to the zoo hypothesis or nothing?” Published online in Nature Astronomy 28 December 2023 (abstract). James Cambias’ fine A Darkling Sea (Tor, 2014) is only the first of his novels, the most recent of which is The Scarab Mission (Baen, 2023), part of his ‘billion worlds’ series. Modesty almost, but not quite, forbids me from mentioning my essay “Ancient Ruins” which ran in Aeon a few years back.
I think it is not sufficient that the “zoo” only gets established after intelligence arises. A planet needs to be quarantined and kept 100% off limits to settlement for the entire time of its existence. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be us, but them, living here now.
I think it is somewhat misleading to speak about a Great Silence. In my understanding, Fermi didn’t mean “why don’t we hear from them”, but rather “why aren’t they right here, instead of us”.
I don’t agree with that characterization. We know from our history that even supposedly friendly interaction can cause harm. Our species is highly hierarchical in nature so the exploitive individuals on either side will try to use any advantage for gain. If some ET Hephaestus offered a tribe fire, why should we assume that all tribes would benefit rather than the tribe offered fire? All technological advance is a 2-edged sword. Even if ET is some moral agency, why should it assume the visited culture is? There was a time when it was suggested that humans had fallen from grace and that our ancestors were more civilized. But we now know that this was not true. Violence, and exploitation by force, were far more common in the past. If anything, the ET KIrk would be truly civilized and need to guard against the less technologically advanced culture.
That humans invoke a supreme being on their side of war suggests to me that any ET visitation might be invoked as proof of righteousness in any conflict.
“Treating a culture like bacteria” might be the least bad thing an advanced ET can do and subtle, hidden, interventions might be the best way to ensure that the culture doesn’t self-destruct.
Consider Clarke’s 2001:ASO. The ETs leave a machine to try to enhance the intelligence of the man-apes that were dying out. They succeeded, although 3 million years later that “successful experiment” resulted in the threat of nuclear annihilation. The “starchild” Bowman prevented that. But 1000 years later, in 3001:TFO the ET technology was planning to exterminate humanity (and the Europans as collateral damage) by destroying our sun. [Quatermass and the Pit posits a similar intervention by the Martian arthropods, but using genetics as the mechanism.]
The question in my mind is “Should ET have just left the man-apes to their fate, or did the “uplift” provide a net benefit?” As this is fiction, our counterfactual is that we survived the winnowing events that are evident in the lack of our genetic diversity. Unless ET did intercede in the past, then our species did OK being left alone.
“If anything, the ET KIrk would be truly civilized and need to guard against the less technologically advanced culture.” Good point. Both Captain Cook and Magellan got killed by less advanced cultures.
Zoo hypothesis or nothing? I think not. I’m limited to the abstract, but I suggest this paper may be yet another example of the “bias of our times”. People of the 1890s imagined a great cannon that could shoot a projectile to the moon, where we would meet its inhabitants living underground. In the 1930s we imagined canals on Mars. Post atomic bomb, 1950s: our great fears were radiation and self-destruction. The 1970s brought warp speed and hyperjumps. 2000s: digital simulation.
Science fiction and public speculation have always viewed what is possible through a time-restricted lens. Any concept of alien civilization and any answer to the Fermi paradox is greatly influenced by the technology, fears, and biases prevalent in the society in which we live.
In my own fictional book, Quantum Space, I imagined the Fermi Paradox to be a result of a fundamental hole in our scientific knowledge. After all, no advanced civilization would attempt to communicate across the galaxy via technology limited by light speed. The distances are far too great; the time lags insufferable. But if we set aside our natural hubris that declares our current scientific knowledge to be all there is, then it’s not hard to imagine that there must be scientific knowledge we lack. Something we still need to discover to earn our membership into the galactic club. We won’t know what that missing element is until we get there, but it’s a good reason to keep asking questions and keep funding basic science. In the meantime, we shouldn’t pretend that the 2020s are any more enlightened than the limited view people had in previous decades.
Warp drive? ;-)
While c limits 2-way communication in our real-time there are other reasons there may be beacons – warnings, encyclopedia galacticas, etc that only require 1-way communication.
Slowing time time sense also works as Kipping’s video indicates. Karl Schroeder explored that in a novel.
Reducing our time sense is not currently a device we biological humans can use, but machine intelligences can simply by reducing their clock speed or introducing delays in their cognition. Our current technology cannot even simulate mouse brain fragments in real time, so I see no reason why machines will not be able to do this at any technology stage, and at will.
Machines with senses slower than trees.
As I mentioned in a previous post, Asimov’s “The Relativity of Wrong” makes it pretty clear we are far more enlightened than the limited view people had in previous decades.
I wonder how much of this is due to humanity’s long beliefs in powerful Gods? Various cultures worship such Gods to bring good fortune (good hunting and harvests, defeat of enemies). The Greeks had the Gods help humans directly with fire (Prometheus), metal-working, etc. Some Gods were benign, others vengeful, perhaps reflecting the various desires of the culture.
ETI is usually depicted as highly advanced. In our industrial period, they were conceived as technologically advanced – traditionally powerful Gods. There are also depictions of them as socially advanced, in which humans are the technologically advanced species visiting them – ET as returned to grace in Eden.
The Zoo Hypothesis is another variant of the caring parent looking after the children at home. Zookeepers, like parents, protect their charges, keep them safe from predators and starvation, and are isolated from the dangers of the outside world. As animals in zoos tend to live longer, what is not to like, even if freedom is lost? As true democracies retreat around the globe, is it possible that some cultures prefer to be constrained and “looked after” by authoritarian rulers, even vote for that outcome?
Is it possible that we yearn for ETI. not so much for companionship, but because we know the dangers of extinction of our civilization and yearn for a parental figure to “make our situation come out alright”? If we are “orphans”, we had better learn to deal with our nature ourselves, or the “Great Filter” will happen.
Perhaps technologically advanced ETI is so rare that we never coexist in time, at least in our galaxy. Maybe this holds for the universe too? In either case, we should consider what we can offer the universe if we take on the role of The old ones and garden the universe ourselves.
I don’t agree with a zookeeper hypothesis if it’s about a parent looking after it’s children. I think it is better to look at deep time and how the people of the past say the age of bronze had a lower quality of life and life span than today. Individual’s born in the distant future will have more freedom than us both technologically and psychologically. One thing is for certain, the an ET civilization with a warp drive is not going to show us how to build one or give that technology to use due to ethics or give us there knowledge on the DNA which might be the same everywhere for all intelligent, humanoid life. Since we know our DNA, we know all DNA which is optimal and universal.
We have to figure it out for ourselves and there are no short cuts to evolution. I can’t imagine myself being re incarnated into a machine, so I want a better future. We don’t exist without our past and the brilliant minds of physics and science who have made today’s level of technology and life style possible for we stand on the shoulders of giants and we don’t exist without the dead people of the past. The people of the future don’t exist without us. The great silence always leaves us with the feeling that we are the most powerful species in the galaxy.
And yet we don’t give animals any choice whether they are to be kept in zoos or not.
There are a number of reasons to support animal zoos, although the best are more like natural reserves (c.f. San Diego), and we do have such reserves with wardens to prevent poaching. Marine reserves are patrolled and now satellites are used to detect illegal fishing in such reserves.
If ETI is that much more intelligent than we are, who is to say their reasons are not valid, even immoral, for keeping us in protected regions? We are ignorant of what is out in space, and ETI is maybe ensuring we can progress without external harm.
To me, the zoo hypothesis fails for other reasons, but I don’t think that there is a moral reason for civilization (or any life-bearing planet) zoos not to exist.
However, James does raise a valid question about the Prime Directive that should not be a single rule – keep isolated until some transformative state (e.g. invention of warp drive) appears.
I think “Outlasting the Universe” recapitulates a series of common misconceptions. Foremost among these is that the blackness of the expanding universe does not represent a source of slow death — rather, this endless increase in entropy is the source of free power that keeps the universe going! Thermodynamics is a dance of hot and cold, and if the blackness of space grows ever colder, then there is always free energy to be had. There is actually a device known now, the “anti-solar cell”, which can extract energy from a warm surface under the blackness of the night sky. Using similar technology, trees likely blanket the dark sides of many a tidally heated moon in our cosmos. https://scitechdaily.com/anti-solar-cells-thermoradiative-photovoltaic-cells-work-at-night/
Note that the “heat death of the universe” properly refers to a situation where space ceases to expand (in once-common closed universe scenarios), so everything becomes the same temperature and there is no energy to extract. That could have happened at our time — we’d look up, and see a night sky that was all white (Olber’s paradox) with a mosaic of trillions of suns. But we’d not look up long, because Earth would be at the same temperature as those distant photospheres. If you lived in the atmosphere of the Sun, you could extract no useful work from all that heat around you, and in the heat death of the universe, the same is true of the Earth’s surface. But no matter how cold the cosmos gets, so long as it continues to expand, it will never reach “heat death”. It merely demands patience as every particle slows down and the time to circumnavigate the universe grows ever longer.
Now I agree with the video’s primary point that by slowing down your metabolism, you can see time go on indefinitely. However, that observation should work in retrospect as well. The era of quark-gluon plasma involved immense heat, immense pressure — immense numbers of “events” — and that means that to its own inhabitants, it should have seemed to go on for roughly as long as our own era seems to be to us. We ourselves live in the embers of a “dead” universe, so far as quark-gluon plasmas are concerned.
The video takes the common parochial view that our own bosons and fermions are what “matters”, and when they die out, all is lost. But it ignores neutrinos, which are being copiously spewed out by every star. For now these are relativistic particles, but on the time scale that they describe, they will redshift down to become nearly immobile, a calm gas prone to condense. Over those eons, they may come to attract and interact one another by forces yet to be discovered, or even ordinary gravity. There will be a new kind of chemistry, a new kind of geology, perhaps even a new kind of star, as they interact in ways that all the science labs in the history of mankind will never be able to detect, even once, because they are so slow or uncommon and so hard for us to touch at all. Perhaps the black holes we know – so tiny by the scale of the future universe – will turn up mysteriously at the middle of their version of galaxies, helping to organize a new cosmology. Just so, our universe is like an endless three-ring circus of physicses, growing ever stranger the further back or forward we look. Perhaps in the Planck Era even the dimensions of space, or the existence of space, was different than it is now… but I expect there are still things over that horizon, in that eternal minute fraction of a second, far beyond the reach of our imaginations!
I also disagree with the notion of humanity the video presents. On one hand, we’re told that machines can simulate what makes a person a person; you can transfer a memory from a brain to a million kinds of futuristic hard drive over the eons, and you are still you. Yet we also are led to think that people running on different machine hardware, or around different black holes, or even time-sharing on the same hardware to save processor cycles, are all different. When we look deeper we should perceive that all consciousness is the same Atman, and our actual history stands preserved in four-dimensional space as our Akashic Record, a snapshot of a higher-dimensional process of time. The urge to survival in physical time, so important to us as mammals evolved on Earth, is not so deeply fundamental; otherwise, why isn’t our current cosmos organized around the maintenance of quark-gluon plasmas? There may be some survivors of former eras out there, but they don’t have to retell and relive their past forever – they are willing to allow our own physics to write a whole new story.
Think about how the ‘zoo’ happens… If the first interstellar civilization decides that’s going to be the policy, all subsequent interstellar civilizations (barring essentially simultaneous development) will have been quarantined in the zoo at one point. Upon release, they get informed of the policy. Even if the first civilization passes from the scene, the zoo policy becomes a legacy of sorts.
Of course, this all presumes that technological civilizations are pretty rare…
It seems unlikely that civilizations that vary widely in biology, culture, and technology would simply accept the “zoo policy” as a legacy to be followed, especially if the legacy was instituted by a different civilization.
Great article, though I must say I find James Cambias’ notion that an alien species revealing themselves and giving the observed species a choice to interact or not the morally correct choice a little too simplistic. If we’re talking about consent then we also must talk about power imbalances, could the fledgling civilization even be capable of consenting? By this I mean, could they even fully understand the ramifications of consenting simply by virtue of being technologically myopic as compared to the contactor civilization. I don’t think so personally, they would have no idea what technologies or scientific knowledge the technologically superior species possessed, much less what possible ramifications such knowledge and tech would have on their own culture and stability.
Not only this but what would count as consent? Earth, for example, has no unified voice. The UN would be the closest organization but despite its lofty ideals it is far from a democratic organization given the veto powers incorporated into its voting structure. Could a lone country such as the US veto the for or against vote? How do you interact with a world that has no firm unity and get any sort of meaningful consent?
Could we miss forest behind trees when pondering over individual Fermi Paradox arguments? What can be said about all arguments, what are the best of them and what can we make of it?
Any argument can be described by some kind of two-dimensional “goodness metric”. How probable is this explanation and how much it implies? The “cosmic zoo” hypothesis fails in both: it is very improbable and it does not constrain much. The best arguments are those that seem likely but give strong constraints; these can be used in combinations. Doing so, we don’t need to take every single argument to it’s extreme. Technological/evolutionary barriers can be something but they need to become impassable Great Filter to explain the Great Silence alone.
So, which combo is the best? A nice one could be built with these arguments, which could be divided into three classes:
1) Small last numbers in the Drake equation:
– Rare technogenesis. We appeared after a combination of not-so-inevitable evolutionary steps and random events; if technogenesis is inevitable then we are outliers.
– Future filters. Most civilizations are kept below the interstellar level by self-destructiveness. The more is the “civilizational mortido”, the lower is the technological ceiling imposed by it. We harness nuclear energy, some can’t do even that. To reach the stars, we must take next steps which are even much more dangerous; those who want to go interstellar must do some real hard work on themselves. Additionally, some next steps in intelligence evolution may be required which are also not granted.
2) Spatial-type arguments:
-“Cosmic wilderness argument”. Those who manage to become interstellar tend to colonize most favorable locations, moving there from less favorable ones. We are in the forest far from the cities. Black hole vicinities, stellar nurseries, other special locations attract them like river deltas and shorelines attract us.
-Possibility of FTL. This takes the “cosmic wilderness” argument to the intergalactic level, or even, when combined with Deep Time, to the scales beyond Hubble horizon. How far one could travel at 1 billion ‘cees’ in ten billion years? Is the local set of fundamental constants the best one?
3) Temporal-type arguments:
-Scarcity of traces. Occasional visitations through Deep Time have not left enough traces for us to find by now.
-Incomprehensibility of Ancients. ETIs who are billions of years ahead of us are utterly beyond our scope; they might be right here and we would not recognize them.
Is all of this enough to explain that we, on our current level, hear only the Great Silence? There is certain optimism behind such combinations. There’s just a set of difficulties; our comprehension and observation capabilities are not enough. But, like it was with exoplanets, keep advancing and eventually we’ll find first something, then much more!
When all you have is a single point, arguments about the curve it represents reveal more about the arguer than the curve.
Personally I’ve gotten fond of something I threw out last article – with a combination of transporting colonists over interstellar distances being REALLY EXPENSIVE and the odds of a compatible biology being present at the destination being REALLY LOW, physical colonization becomes arbitrarily hard.
And again, given how limited our observational ability is, assertions that we would know it if they existed don’t hold water
This is KSR’s repost on easy interstellar colonization.
Our Generation Ships Will Sink
Hi Paul
Another very interesting read and paper to follow up on. I’ve just emailed it to myself to save and read tonight.
Thanks Edwin
Perhaps no zoo is necessary because of extreme dilution. I was musing over a Penrose Diagram’s white hole region and wondering if some future physics/technology could allow a civilisation to get over there, and optionally return to share its success with similarly advanced neighbours. This would result in a diaspora into alternate universes and statistically would thoroughly empty this particular universe of advanced ETIs.
The clue is in the time scale. If these long deep times are unimaginable, why would any resulting culture/technology/motivation/psychology be even remotely comprehensible?
Wild animals are surrounded by a relatively advanced culture. But they literally cannot see that it exists. It’s invisible to them, even though they share a physical space with the entities that live in it.
Occasionally they see something strange, but it doesn’t register as evidence of a technological culture, because their brains aren’t sophisticated enough to understand what technology is. After a car has passed they forget it almost instantly, and go back to sniffing for food and marking territory.
It seems very naive to me to assume that our brains are as good as it gets. It’s far more plausible that we’re animals surrounded by a culture we can’t even recognise, never mind understand.
Meanwhile the culture isn’t trying to communicate with us, because we’re not sentient enough to be interesting.
Even if the entire earth was being kept as a pet or run as a farm of some kind, we wouldn’t be aware of it.
How can we speculate on the moral and ethical behavior of ETI when we can’t even properly discuss their logical and rational behavior? My own opinion (and that’s all it is, opinion) is that other species will be exceedingly rare in the galaxy at any one time, and that any encounter they have with another culture will likely be their first. Will their first reaction be one of delight (WOW!, We’re not alone, lets interact entusiastically with these creatures!) or sheer paranoia (Danger, Danger.! Exterminate these beings, they are probably a threat to us, and even if not, we can’t take any chances.)
On the other hand, it cannot be ruled out that civilizations are quite common in the galaxy. If that is the case, it is likely that they will have had several encounters with other cultures by the time they stumble on to us. They will be experienced. They will have thought it all out and have a plan in place to deal with the meeting, perhaps even one worked out and agreed on with their prior contacts.
In either case, zoos or quarantines seem unlikely, except for a brief period while they are determining our capabilities. They’re probably too smart to waste time speculating on our motivations. Once they’ve evaluated our level of technical capability, it will either be all-out war or a party. My guess is the latter will be the most likely. But its only my guess.
A galactic encyclopedia will likely have warnings about planets where visitors not making themselves and their technology available to the natives is considered immoral. Many of these planets will also carry the warning that non-biological people will not be recognized as people.
Cambias’s response is aggressively superficial. The zoo hypothesis has many provisional variations. Using a variation like the requirement for advanced weapon systems to defend the zoo to rule out all variations is equivalent to a fish arguing it is impossible for them to be in a preserve because they could be in an aquarium. For the life of me, I don’t understand why the variety principle is taken so seriously.
As a moral axiom, Cambias offers something that would require reshaping human society until is acceptable for a child to enlist in the army and, to celebrate their last summer of freedom, take out a loan by a car, drugs, and alcohol so they can visit the adults they met online. Or to put it less lively, would require an author make themselves and their work available on demand. There is no axiom here, just a rationalization.
As far as I can tell, the zoo hypothesis only has two necessary requirements:
the zookeeper precedes the subject of the zoo and the cost of the zoo satisfies the zookeepers motivations, investment risk profile and expectations for return on investment. There is no inherent demand for longevity or infrastructure. The zookeeper will always be faced with the question of when to substantially impact a species. What is the moral distinction between offering technology such as immortality treatments to Neanderthals, homo sapiens 200,000 years in the past, current homo sapiens, or homo sapiens 200,000 years in the future?
I agree with Kipping about the inevitability of non-biological people but disagree with his predictions for the ecosystem that emerges. When I look at my computer and I can’t imagine multiple minds sharing it as a body unless I or higher IT power makes them. Agency and, more importantly, power resides in base reality.
I think Mr. Shaw needs to read my full blog post, not just the excerpts, which may have given him a false impression. I wasn’t advocating the kind of pre-emptive violent response he takes exception to, I was pointing out that alien civilizations trying to protect a Zoo would also likely not want to engage in pre-emptive violence. So they would need to _warn_ potential interlopers away from the Zoo, which means the sky should be full of beacons if we’re actually inside a Zoo volume of space.
And I really don’t understand his point about some moral axiom I’m advocating which would require reshaping human society. Where did I say that? I am probably more opposed to any idea of reshaping society than most people.
A zookeeper’s willingness to defend the zoo and the infrastructure that demands are provisional, they can’t be predicted only observed. The statement that a zookeeper will likely feel this way and use this thing are meaningless as predictions. It is certainly useful to list variations but we have no way use the absence of a variation as evidence for the absence of all variations. As far as I can tell, that is the obvious logic of your blog post.
You describe ETI not making themselves or their toys available to us as immoral. Are you claiming there is no moral axiom behind this claim?
There are two separate issues here. Is it moral to spy on a low-tech civilization secretly, and is it moral to give them advanced technology?
My position is that it _is_ immoral — or at least disrespectful and patronizing — to treat an intelligent species as, well, zoo animals or lab specimens. Do you disagree?
But I absolutely don’t think it’s good, or wise, to hand out advanced technology. Our hypothetical Captain Kirk has a perfect right to tell the Capellans “No, I’m not going to explain how our warp drive works.”
Let’s put this in real-world terms. Japan is a highly advanced country in terms of technology and industry. Laos, not far away, is one of the most underdeveloped nations. It would be weird for Japan to refuse all contact between the countries in order to “protect” Laos. But Japan has a perfect right to conceal trade secrets, military technology, etc. from Laotians or anyone else, and it would be absurd for Japanese assistance to Laos to focus on things the Laotian economy and education system can’t support.
We treat children as children because they _are_ children. Treating a whole species of adults as children has some ugly precedents in human history.
I agree with Mr. Shaw that it’s always dangerous to make assumptions about what _all_ aliens would or would not do. But I don’t think there are any flaws in my reasoning about the Zoo hypothesis as stated in my blog post.
And now I’m going to shut up.
I do agree that we shouldn’t expect all ETI to behave the same way, the so called “variety principle”. However that isn’t my argument against your reasoning. You employ the “exclusivity principle”, the argument that the absence of a potential and detectable variation precludes or weakens the probability that potential but undetectable variations are present.
I may have given you reason to take my criticism personally and for that I apologize. The exclusivity principle is poorly reasoned but you aren’t the first only person to use it. You are also not the first person to intentionally or unintentionally confuse the two.
As an author you must see your reasoning relies on emotionally charged words like spy and lab animal. Watching us is not the equivalent of spying or experimenting on us. Imho, the way I have been describing the subject, as not making themselves or their creations available to us, doesn’t employ emotional language. Stated cleanly, it is much harder to impose moral judgement on the action. As well, the zoo hypothesis makes no inherent demand for watching. Like the proximity and mutual detectability of Laos and Japan, it is a conditional variation of the zoo hypothesis.
Aliens wouldn’t have to be well hidden for us not to notice them. Consider sunspots. Twice in the 22-year Hale cycle, we see sunspots detach from their deep roots, migrate from high latitudes to the solar equator, and decay into vertical magnetic fields; whither from there and whence they came, no one knows. Now sunspots are famous radio broadcasters, and can even generate aurora-like lights on the Sun ( https://www.space.com/sunspot-emissions-similar-to-auroras-earth ), or on Earth of course. Shortly after humans constructed power and telegraph networks, a group of sunspots made a very respectable attempt to signal to us — the Carrington Event — which was strong enough to power those telegraph cables without batteries. But so far no one has made sense of their transmissions, and to suggest sunspots as sentient beings is just mad, so no one has ever focused a beam of prime numbers at them that I’m aware of. Though that just begs to be put into the plot of a novel…
Sunspots are not objects and they do not move. They are manifestations of a process that is only partially understood and modeled. It is the same with fire: flames are not objects and they don’t move. They are manifestations of a process (combustion).
I suppose you can try communicating with the process, provided you can find its “ears”. Sunspots are neither.
I wasn’t really expecting to convince you that sunspots are sentient aliens; after all, there is a huge burden of proof there. But I should emphasize that if we try to say something about the Great Filter, Fermi paradox and such, then that crushing burden of proof comes down on the other side. If we don’t understand a sunspot and we don’t understand sentience, it is challenging to prove a sunspot isn’t sentient. But if we can’t actually prove that, then we certainly can’t prove that we’ve never seen any aliens. This even filters through to statements made only about human-like aliens, because we can’t rule out indirect influences. For example, perhaps the magnetic field line reconnections of sunspots led them to a natural method to modulate radio transmissions that is different from AM or FM. Because sunspots occur spontaneously all over the galaxy, none of the clued-in aliens broadcast the way we expect them to.
To quibble… living humans are processes, not objects. Omit only the sodium and potassium currents across certain membranes in the CNS, and you’ll never make first contact with them! Also, people aren’t really organisms, let alone objects, but ecological communities. Details of the gut microbiome help determine whether you are anxious, depressed, autistic, or schizophrenic, while parasites (symbiotes?) such as Toxoplasma affect outgoing behavior. If we’re serious about planetary protection, we should have a colony of axenic or at least gnotobiotic humans for Mars colonization – but I’m not aware of any study showing whether their thoughts and behavior would seem altogether ordinary or outright alien to us.
Also, sunspots do move; at times they even seem playful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BejRxZAa66E
I recently returned from a trip to the Yucatan peninsula, where I saw incredible stone ruins built by a civilization that spread across a vast area, somehow building cities, pyramids and road networks across the most remote jungle. They had a writing system, sophisticated astronomy, complex water management and impressive construction skills (I saw a perfectly cut round brick tower in the jungle that looked like it could’ve been from the 19th century, but it was 1200 years old). The fact that they were able to do all this, yet the whole thing collapsed so quickly, was pretty mind-boggling to me. I even hired a Mayan to act as my guide and travelled into his community (people forget that the Mayans are still there by the millions, but they live in very poor conditions by our standards). And while I was exploring ruins in the jungle, thousands of workers and military personnel were rushing to finish the “Tren Maya”, a huge project to connect most of the major Mayan sites by train. I saw garbage everywhere in town, especially plastic bottles, overflowing every garbage bin and littering the ground.
All of this felt kind of like being on another planet, where a fallen civilization and a civilization that is trying to rise coexist at the same time. And yet his “rising” civilization is cutting huge swathes through the jungle with their railroad, cutting down countless trees and disturbing wild habitats across the Yucatan, while producing frightening amounts of undegradable waste. The ancient Mayans themselves, according to a leading theory, collapsed because they overshot their environment, deforested their land, depleted their soil, ran out of water and had to abandon their complex cities because they couldn’t figure out how to live sustainably in their environment.
So for me we don’t need to go to intergalactic scales or come up with science fictional “zoo hypotheses” to explain the Fermi “paradox”. The obvious answer to why technological civilizations appear to be so rare is that nobody can figure out this problem of living sustainably as their industry and technology advance, and eventually a collapse takes them down and they are unable to rise again to a high technological level. The problem of sustainability may be contradictory to the expansionary impulse that leads to space exploration, so if you choose sustainability you stay at a relatively “primitive”, local level, while if you choose expansion, you eventually flame out from your own excess (because space colonization turns out to be infeasibly difficult).
All of this is pure speculation of course, but to me it’s the simplest explanation, for which we have many, many examples from our own planet’s history.
Imho, long-term sustainability is possible and, perhaps obviously, requires efficient utilization of resources and limiting the scale of infrastructure and populations. Loud and grabby aliens may be unfit for deep time, and besides ETI that are intentionally signaling us, those are the only ones we could see.
Chemistry needs survival, growth and replication to become life. Unchecked, these imperatives will expand to consume all available resources including space.Technologic advancement will overcome the checks upto resource depletion. Yeast in a vat of sugar-water.
Adjusting self and resoures so that renewability of resources is never outpaced requires intelligence, understanding and self-restraint in the case biological beings. Machines would not inherit the biological imperatives and may fare differently.
I’m glad no one is arguing for the “Double-Stupid Hypothesis,” which states that “maybe they just don’t want to talk to us.” Just in case, I’ll poke at it a bit. :-)
When we’re talking about deep time, there is no “they” (unless you mean every intelligent species over billions of years) and there was no “us” (unless you mean the bacteria on Earth during the billions of years when it was a promising colonization target, with an oxygen atmosphere, no life in the seas above bacteria, and no life on land at all).
For the Zoo Hypothesis to work, someone had to protect the planet from the moment it developed any kind of life at all. Otherwise, some other race would have imported their own ecosystem and set up camp here. And, as Fermi observed, we would not be here.
But I think that sinks the Zoo hypothesis. Every single intelligent race–over eons–had to protect the Earth even when there was no good reason to do so. Someone, in all of that time, surely would have snapped it up.
The only hypothesis that explains the silence is that we’re alone in the Milky Way. (Or, at least, there have never been any star-faring civilizations worthy of the name.) We don’t want to believe that, but the great challenge of our time is choosing an inconvenient truth over a comfortable lie.
Those zookeepers would have to be psychopathic sadists. How else to explain that they would observe and prevent interference in an evolving ecology for billions of years full of death, extinction, predation and worse for countless organisms, including the latter ones with an increasing amount of self-awareness and intelligence. Non-interference in a case like this can be read as a monumental crime.
This approach assumes not just that ETI spread to inhabit the galaxy but also colonize every habitable planet and star system. I am willing to generalize ETIs expanding into the galaxy but not a particular lifestyle, which loud and grabby is. Imho, this approach better matches our evidence. Life generally spreads and a species footprint depends on its lifestyle traits; coral leaves a very different footprint than sharks. The amount of time it takes to spread throughout the galaxy is short compared to the age of galaxy but an eternity compared to the potential evolution rate of a space faring peoples lifestyle.
The Fermi question isn’t a logical paradox unless you assume loud and grabby is the only possible ETI galaxy inhabiting lifestyle. The Fermi “paradox” is an over-confident bluff.
The zoo hypothesis must assume that, at least for the time being, they don’t want to talk to us. I don’t know how it is possible to predict the probability of this motivation. It is either their motivation or it isn’t.
Your comments about the Maya and their inheritors highlight perfectly the idea that technologically advanced civilizations are necessarily more advanced in other areas.
The ancient Mesoamerican communities lived in harmony with their environment, exploiting it successfully in a sustainable fashion, and were long-lived and stable, but the cultures that succeeded them all seem to be burning the candle at both ends.
Although it is certainly possible for technological advancement to be successfully integrated for long term benefit, it does not follow that it must be so. Perhaps this suggests a new variation of the Fermi Paradox: those societies which advance too quickly in technological terms without tempering it with thoughtful planning and management tend to fizzle out prematurely. Those who constantly laud the3virtues of aggressive, expansionist. colonial/imperial/mercantilist policies might consider the lessons of the Maya. Sure, the Conquistadudes had steel weapons, horses and gunpowder, but they did not last as long as the indigenous peoples they crushed. And how long will the Maya Theme Park Railway survive?
Perhaps the reason “they” haven’t come here yet is that the desire to do so is what weeds them out.
Henry (Cordova): “The ancient Mesoamerican communities lived in harmony with their environment, exploiting it successfully in a sustainable fashion, and were long-lived and stable,”
Indeed so, within a referent timeframe. Technology speeds up the exploitation by overcoming the obstacles; more obstacles overcome sooner means more rapid progression – towards depletion. Reining in the biological imperatives of survival, growth and replication to achieve a steady state between resource utilization and replenishment will require intelligence, understanding and restraint well beyond anything currently manifest in human society.
A society capable of reconciling its needs, environment and its responses to them may be capable of long-term stability, but it may not be a very pleasant place to live–at least not for humans. Really long-term stable civilizations may be social insect-like in their organization. Laissez faire cultures like our own may be short-lived and brutal, but at least they sound more interesting.
I’ve often wondered if the price civilizations have to pay for long life is strict regimentation, and if the individuals in them are not biologically wired that way they would be intolerable to their members. If only highly regimented species last long enough to manage their planetary resources in a way that assures their longevity and ability to achieve interstellar commerce and communication, then perhaps we’re better off not running into any of them.
They might feel we were too unruly and needed to be disciplined. And we might think they were Communists and needed to be exterminated.
This is exactly the same problem for the awake population in a worldship. It must be tightly controlled to be stable to ensure nothing catastrophic happens before the destination is reached.
Heinlein seemed to assume something similar in vulnerable colonies, such as lunar settlements. Summary judgement was being put out the airlock without a spacesuit.
Human societies are hierarchical based on our primate evolution. The “natural” result is the establishment of a social order that entrances roles, often by heredity. Even when the order is broken, such as the imposition of Communism which was set up to be far more egalitarian, it failed as we saw in both the USSR/Russia and China with the creation of elites. Same with the French revolution that in a few short years saw the demise of those wannabe leaders like Robespierre, and the eventual crowning of an emperor- Napoleon. France is now in its 5th Republic, established by de Gaulle after WWII in 1958.
The idea of social stabilization is right, but I don’t think it’s quite that: the “elite” imposes itself because it’s power-hungry and society, as a social “body”, naturally aspires to stability. Robespierre was dethroned by his equally power-hungry enemies, then French society, tired of the crimes committed (in France, this historical period 1789-1792 is called “la terreur”), gave way to a “soft” and corrupt regime, until Napoleon seized power in November 1799 to restore order to our history. In the communist world, it was also a corrupt “elite” that seized power, and it didn’t work, because the notion of equality – which originated in the French & US 18th century with Voltaire Rousseau etc. – raises the eternal question of governing the people by themselves: is this possible without delegating representatives? This is the great “contradiction” of Democracy; I think Thoreau talked about it. I just wanted to react as a French, descendant of polish. But it’s not all astronomy…
…unless ETIs also have a political system? :)
I guess there is no easy solution at all for interstellar sustainability, and this is part of explanation of the Great Silence. The higher is the technology, the less must be self-destructiveness of species to sustainably use it. Most don’t reach the stars because they repeatedly smash into their technological ceiling and fall back into diesel/solar, steam or even stone age. Raising the ceiling to iterative-interstellar-allowing level requires such a lowering of self-destructiveness that most do not succeed before their time runs out. We might build our first true sustainable and Earth-independent interstellar colony… by AD 100 000 000, if we rely only on evolution for it, and are lucky to evolve into a more careful species!
Technological advancement is convergent with psychological evolution. According to Jung, when technological advancement is too far ahead of psychological development, we have large scale wars like the first and second world wars. The idea of today’s highest level of consciousness and advanced level of technology is not difficult to understand, but we tend to assume we have arrived and there will be not higher levels. The zoo hypothesis lacks a depth psychological view. It has the right final destination, but not the cause which is psychology. For example. Psychological evolution always requires at some point everyone to get along to survive, the self preservation of our species as a whole. We like to think that fate does not play a role, but it does. It’s not personal choice with necessity. We either work together or we perish.
We still like to think that the evolution of consciousness is an arbitrary choice. We can clearly that some of our assumptions about ET’s with interstellar travel are trapped in the present and past zeitgeist, but not the future. Level’s of consciousness change with the zeitgeist. For example: We are not contacted only for our benefit, but will never be a threat to ET’s with warp drives and FTL. By the time we have a warp drive, we will also have learned to deal with our psychological problems, shadow projection etc. The ideal society is an ideal to strive towards. We simply call it utopian socialism and consider it impossible. The idea is that when our planet is one million years older than we will be much more technologically and psychologically advanced as a collective than today, the collective consciousness. Consequently, there will be no wars, no crime, no drug addiction, not poverty and starvation. Many diseases will be cured and all of our power problems with be solved and our technology will give us fast interstellar travel and more freedom of movement than today.
My point is that there are no evil ET’s with warp drives and interstellar travel. They still are flawed just like us, but they have learned or found many more ways to find or express the shadow in a positive way in the life of every individual. Our evolution will be convergent.
All that can happen, will happen. It is just a question of time.
Sooner or later there will be a galactic civilization covering the entire Milky Way.
The question is how long will it take to happen.
A reference to Alex’s earlier comment in this post may be in order:
Our Generation Ships Will Sink
It is clear that interstellar traveling is not going to be possible during the next decades.
But for every problem there is a solution. The human history is like that.
If you could tell somebody from the Xth century that humans would fly in the XXth century, he would never believe it and he would be able to enlist and endless number of reasons for that being impossible…
“All that can happen, will happen. It is just a question of time.”
Not in a finite universe.
Could do in a finite quantum multiverse, although would not do in countless versions. However, I think the key point is what can be done, and it could well be the case that colonising the galaxy can’t be done.
The galactic society is already there right now. We just don’t have the technology to see it. We have to graduate first to join the club. We are still in grammar school.
“The nagging issue here is that we would have to assume that all civilizations are temporally limited. It takes only one to find a way through whatever ‘great filter’ is out there and survive into a star-faring maturity to get the galaxy effectively visited and perhaps colonized by now.”
I don’t think we have to assume that all civilizations are temporarily limited. This statement assumes that the filter isn’t filtering out colonizing species. Look at us for example. It’s all we can talk about, but in order to be a colonizer, the species must think of itself as more important than any other it comes across. That self important attitude has led us to being close to, if not past, extinguishing ourselves. We can’t get along with ourselves, never mind any other living thing. If the universe filters against such selfishness, as it appears to be doing with us, then those that make it past it won’t be rushing to every planet they can find and colonizing it, whether life already exists there or not. The fact that we haven’t been ‘colonized’ by a more advanced race could be an indication of that type of filter. Maybe we should change our attitude, towards ourselves and every other living thing, in order to make it past that filter. When we find a planet that is habitable, but already has life on it, maybe we wouldn’t be in a rush to send ‘colonists’ there as fast as we can. Maybe the correct path is to leave all other planets alone to evolve on their own path. An alternative to colonization could be to build colonies in space outside of deep gravity wells, containing the environmental conditions that we evolved in. Or maybe if physical and mental technology advances far enough, we would have access to higher dimensions and move on from this universe altogether. In both cases we would become essentially invisible to those with technologies similar to our current level. The space colonies would be too small, both gravitationally and energetically, to detect with current methods. The extra-dimensional species would essentially disappear from this universe, and again be undetectable. These ideas are all speculation of course, but at least they are not limited to only the zoo or none hypothesis. This seems to me to be too premature, given the short timespan that we have been actually looking, and the amount of data we have.
(Ross Turner):”The extra-dimensional species would essentially disappear from this universe, and again be undetectable.”
Dimensions and realities are accepted in ancient Indian (Buddhist & Vedic) logic.
Speculation may not be quite off the mark.
If they stay in their home system, then wouldn’t these habitats ultimately create a Dyson swarm that could be detectable? If they migrate to other systems for resources, then they are effectively colonizing new systems and slowly filling the galaxy.
Neither of these 2 scenarios negates the idea that the civ sends out probes to explore the galaxy. If this civ is stable, then it doesn’t matter if the probe data takes millions of years to return. These probes may be detectable, either active or dead, especially in systems with life, like ours.
If small scale infrastructure is more successful over the long run than large scale, you are predicting that, or asking if, sustainable infrastructure inevitably becomes unsustainable. If either is true, we are less likely to see large scale infrastructure. That being said an ETI that builds small scale, sustainable infrastructure can still expand into the galaxy. Being conscientious about the limits of your environment does not preclude expansion. Imo, generalizing expansion is a safe prediction. The Fermi questions fails to be a paradox because it generalizes a particular version of expansion, loud and grabby, not expansion in general.
Our solar system is home to a potentially extraordinarily rare resource. We can’t expect a population of probes in our system to conform to a galaxy wide generalization.
Agreed on both points you make. I just wonder about detecting either though. In the first case the Dyson swarms/spheres could be so few and far apart that we might never find any, even if they are there. It could be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
As for slowly filling the galaxy with space colonies and using the resources of the colonized systems, I think that goes against the idea of an altruistic civilization and we are back to allowing colonizing species. There isn’t much difference between landing on a planet with colonists, or stripping the whole system of resources. Both end up cutting short the evolution of an existing species. In the planet colonization case, it cuts it short right away, in the system resource case, it limits what choices an emerging intelligence has if they ever do get the technology to leave their home.
In the case of probes, would we recognize them? They might look like natural objects, and if they are no longer active they could be impossible to find. If they are active and moving through the solar system, it could lead to a big argument about whether it is natural or manufactured, and then it leaves before we can intercept it and figure it out. Of course it might be totally obvious, we could spot an obviously manufactured probe that we didn’t make. We can speculate about it until we have scoured our system as thoroughly as possible, and find something or not.
More data and longer observation time with better instruments will help us.
I look forward to more results from the Trappist system. Hopefully we’ll find some of the planets do have atmospheres, but even if none of them do, we’ve learned something more than we know now.
Space habitats neither have to increase in number to extract the maximum of resources, nor need they go to any lifeless system – a variant of the “Prime directive”.
In extremist we humans should not be extracting all the resources of Earth or our system either, as it would deprive future intelligent terrestrial species of these resources.
To some extent the choices depend on whether intelligent, hi-tech civilization s are common or not. If they are common, then any world with bacteria as the sole inhabitants could be expected to have hi-tech intelligence at some point in the future. If rare, then why not exploit resources as the probability is very low that any individual world will ever have hi-tech species.
I’ve only recently heard the term zoo hypothesis, but I agree with what Wikipedia writes about the outcome or it’s goal, but not all of the reasons. What is it not addressed is the idea that in order for the galactic club or society to work is that it has to have FTL propulsion technology for it’s inter stellar travel. This idea would make colonization, Dyson swarms and interstellar probes completely obsolete because these ideas are trapped in the past technological zeitgeist.
I won’t lie that I am using my scientific intuition to look for a future direction and goal based on my UFO research. Certain assumptions and axioms have to be accepted to make the zoo hypothesis work. The idea is that small six foot spy probes as those seen in the Navy Omaha stealth ship film over the Pacific might use an negative energy, anti gravity space warp which is not too far fetched because one important idea in physics is when other possibilities have been ruled out, then what’s left must be the truth. The importance this idea is if your civilization can make anti gravity technology that small which would have to be very energy efficient, then you can make the larger mother ship which uses the same technology, a space warp or warp drive must use negative energy. I don’t think those small probes had to make the interstellar travel distance which is too far or would take too long. They had to be transported with a larger ship. One could always argue that these probes were man made, but for me that is counter intuitive.