The Fermi Paradox: Rare Technology 

All praise the Omnissiah :)

Sure, come here as fast as you can! *(Giggles in scrapcode while opening a can of obliteratior virus)*

praise be to the machine spirits 10100101101111100001010101010!

Lol

Please do not use sacred cogitators for this purpose brothers. We still need to find the toasters.

Consider: Someone interested in the Fermi Paradox likely has enough attention span and willingness to delay gratification to just pay attention and sit through the video.

I rarely click on a video less than five minutes long. I guess that makes the difference between the dumbs with short attention spans and the intellectually capable of us though. Far more of the former around unfortunately.

@@SerunaXI Not when it comes to most other channels, I don't.

Isaac has the skill to keep his listeners rooted to thier seat even during recaps, he makes everything interesting.

I wish the episodes were longer

Clarkes 1st(?) Law in action.

Dunning-Kruger effect: The more you know, the less you know you know.

popuptoaster a very fine pun upon a quote from Plato’s Republic! Thankyou sir.

Brilliant!

Clare Wulf “ he who knows not, and, does not know he does not, is a fool, shun him, but he who knows he knows not is wise follow him.” Thank you for your time sire1

I look forward to the fifth installment.

@@merrittanimation7721 "Episode 5: Mostly Harmless Alien Intelligences" :D

Heh

Never liked the movie.

@@backwardsman8887 I'd like to encourage you to read the books- they're written unlike anything I've ever read

A species like ours even that just doesn't preserve or value history to.

Yeah and I'm irked I didn't think to make that point explicitly as it's a good one for highlighting how that 'sacrifice' mindset often included 'give your best ox/goat/etc' If that's a valid connection it has a huge impact on thinking, for stuff like 'put your whole heart into an endeavor'

And we are a somewhat wasteful species Other species might not be, and have no need to expand Needs drive technology

Don't think agriculture was a big choice people gathered to make. It started with the scattering of seeds along grain carrying paths, which led to slow domestication (of both plant and human) until people just forgot across generations the forager lifestyle

@@cosmic_gate476 I think agriculture started when a smart nomad returned to one of their camps and noticed an apple tree in the exact spot they threw an apple core some time ago. And the need to protect and plan for such crops would be a good driver for tech/intel.

I choice we still make. Kill the small weak plants, eat them young, leave the best. Pick the strongest and nicer plants to flower, eat the others. We are constantly doing that, even when gardening!. I have vegetables and I still do that so I can get my own seeds and improve the plants to my soil and climate so I can have better plants that can have extended seasons, regrowth and frost/high sun heath tolerance cycles.

I sometimes miss the Fudd graphic :)

Having lived in Australia, where the "R" is pronounced as "ah", I have no problem with his voice. He says "o-ah" for "R", which is not that uncommon worldwide. The content of these videos is amazing. Reminds me of the sci-fi I grew up with; Issac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, et al.

@@isaacarthurSFIA For what it's worth, I dont have trouble understanding you at all. It's annoying that it's even something that needs to be discussed to be honest; I like your voice, its unique.

Happy Halloween Isaac, your fans appreciate your dedication to producing high quality videos every single week

@@Drew_McTygue Thank you Drew!

Happy Halloween! For this theme you should watch the guns Germs and steel documentaries or read the book of the same name I think you will find it interesting as you will see that technology it's not at all inevitable, what it's more, if the planet its too stable or too extreme it will not develop at all, we spent hundreds of thousands of years as hunters gatherers mostly because it made more sense to stay that way most of our history do to glaciation, if the climate had not changed I would argue that we would be still hunting animals, also the trigger of technology was a killer combination of a small return to glaciation and the black death that destroyed the populations of Europe forcing them to look for alternatives that coupled with their lucky geography developed into science, had not been for that we would not had been as developed as swords and horses did well enough for thousands of years

@@Meow-gp5nk its not that there's anyone that have higher average IQ, that's a myth, it has to do more with geography and environmental factors, the Eurasian continent its ideal for trade and live stock, the rest of the continents not so much until very recent times and yet the geography of Europe its what made the pests and glaciations hit hard in the first place, a good example of a place where that didn't happened and had a climate too stable its China, they never really had any incentive to be as innovative as Europe

Happy Halloween Isaac, lets hope youtube dropping grid layout from the main page is just a Halloween 'trick'.

I also think this might be the likeliest explanation to the Fermi paradox. As unlikely it is, we actually might be THE first technological civilization at least in our own galaxy.

@@mrs7195 even though there's a large amount of the universe's history where life as we know it is all but impossible the fact is that there's still plenty of time behind us for life like us to have evolved thousands of times over. It was a specific set of circumstances that has brought us to where we are now, if any number of minor things happened differently in our worlds past we could easily be a thousand years into traveling the stars, or one of any number of other animals could have made the climb to sapiency. If we assume that a large number of the closest million stars have had the same amount of time for events to play out it's still a question as to why one or more of those stars hasn't spawned an obvious stellar civilization. Remember, in the course of only a few hundred years we advanced from technology that was only slightly changed over that of the Greek city states to what we have now. If the political and social environment had been a bit different a few thousand years ago we would have been primed for something like the industrial and technological revolutions that define our modern world and in the intervening centuries we could easily have a robust space economy and people living outside of our solar system even assuming technology capped out at what we can see as being possible today.

in another video, this was included as a miscellaneous fermi paradox solution

@@DrewLSsix yeah, but you realize that all what you is saying it's about humans, right? Things could be different, but things aren't, one thousand years, in cosmic scale is nothing, so if things could happen sonner or later, between centurys, that was irrelevant, in the cosmic scale, they will happen in the same way, things really start to change after a million years or more, that is the time that we will probably will be able to spot an advanced civilization in this galaxy. As civilization, we are very young, humanity is around this world for 7 million year, if things could happen 100 hundred thousand years ago, we will probably be reaching some closest stars by now, but even at this point, we couldn't be easily spoted to anyone looking at this stars, like we look at them right now. So, they are either more or less at same level that us, or they are far advance that we could spot them everywhere we look. Since we never notice anything like it so far, or we are early, or they still don't have enough influence that we can notice them.

@@DrewLSsix I see your point of view, though I wonder if there's something we're missing about the state of the universe that would make us one of the first waves of complex life. For example, might abiogenesis be so rare that most life starts from asteroid impacts? And hence we are one of the first planets in the galactic neighborhood to receive life?

I'm so pleased this is here!! I read a story about two hikers who got lost. One was really familiar with survival techniques and after a few days stopped eating completely.. As eating small amounts of strange (uncooked amphibians and insects) food is really bad when your body is hungry... Despite telling the other hiker again and again the other hiker kept trying to eat everything.... Including a mossy mush... Thirst, hunger, temperature extremes and need for sleep will trump disgust and fear every time...

Indeed, one always think that we are in control of our minds when quite possibly it's the other way around, your mind will override any sense of pride or disgust if it means your very survival, the mind works in mysterious ways..

My brother and I say similar things about the flamethrower. "Man, I wanna set that fella' over there on fire, but he keeps moving away!" "I got just the thing."

@@Grimpy970 i once thought about it as someone thinking "man i really want someone to be on fire but they're far away and i dont want to go over there, what could i use"

@Jonathan Stiles i dont even know if the chinese have records as to who first came up with the stuff

@Jonathan Stiles It's ironic they catapulted the advance of genocide technologies in the search of an elixir of life. Wait, what if that's what has been happening in other alien civilizations?!

If they arose several thousand years ahead of us, they likely primarily exist within their home star system and it may be several million years before they ever start to think that even a single one of the stars within their galaxy just doesn't pump out enough power and that they ought to try and collect as much of it as possible.

Even the exclusive things that you have to pay for?

@@GubekochiGoury do you actually want me to edit my comment and "content that you publish for free"?

I'll watch anything he publishes

Hmm... that's a hell of a confounding factor. ...or are the rich families rich because they were better at delaying gratification? Were the poor kids really poor enough to not have enough food around? I'd be surprised if upper-class families Didn't tend to have cultural traits based on better impulse control. It's hard to hold on to the family fortune if you dip into the principal to buy sports cars and extra marshmallows. Asking as a person that ate all of the marshmallows right away and now I'm poor.

You Both make good points but you know we live in the matrix and none of this is real

Yes, also we live in The Matrix. That is a second confounding variable. Poor people might have been programed to be poor by the Architect.

Even "successful" is kinda subjective. A bunch of people who will wait for more marshmallows set up a test and found that kids who wait for more marshmallows tend to be more successful... By the standards of the people who made the test.

@@kinguin7 Well, if success is subjective, then there isn't any objective difference in success and there isn't any sort of "inequality" to worry about in the first place.

Yeah I was surprised too, especially when I noticed that the first Great Filters episode has clawed it's way up to our #4 video on the channel in the last few months; which I'll admit, heavily influenced my willingness to revisit the series :)

@@isaacarthurSFIA thank you Isaac for sharing your amazing work.

Same, it's scary how fast time flies

3 years now 🛸

Sounds a lot like Jordan Peterson's take on the development of civilization actually, which makes sense if you see psychological rigor in the analysis.

jet flaque - Trick - No snacks & drinks!

Slave labour is very ineffective though. You can be far more productive by just working together and having more people motivated to produce results.

Brandaan Vandebotermet indeed I just used slave labor and Greece/ Ancient Greek available technology to show how labour can interfere with technological development. Capitalism is more efficient then slavery which is good because to me it suggests it could be more prevalent.

@@wastelesslearning1245 pure capitalism is its own form of slavery. Why do you think businesses have so many regulations.

@Hunter Smith got to disagree with you on that metallurgy limitation. The greeks are the same people who made cranes and pully claw to flip war ships, steam bottle rockets, create the first luxury cruise ship, pretty advanced water clocks, the first vending mechine, ect. Their metallurgy was sufficient for automation if not then they had alternative machining approaches that would supplement.

@@brandaanvandebotermet4579 I know that and we all do with hind sight but in the moment a society with have a mental block when it comes to "why bother when slaves can do it".

Does that mean we also domesticated mathematics?

TruncateCar3 Fire is not an abstract thought form, maths is. the two are not comparable in this way.

True. But physics for instance is NOT an invention. It should be the same for everyone everywhere in the universe. If it isn't, then some of our fundamental assumptions about science are invalid... Mathematics appears to be in the same category as physics, but it's harder to demonstrate the universality of mathematics isn't say, an artifact of how the human brain is wired...

In the 3rd grade, we had to write essays for state testing and our principle graded them. I wrote that fire was the most important invention man kind has ever created. I got an F, because "fire isn't an invention". That was the practice test. Then in the real test, my prompt was, "where would you take a vacation, if you could go anywhere you wanted?". I wrote that I wanted to go to Mars. I got an F because, "You cant go to Mars".

@@danielpiechowicz2898 , your third grade teachers were jerks.

Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters will get you everytime.

In my opinion it would slow down the advance which would probably be an advantage. Charcoal can replace coal on a smaller scale. Concentrated solar can generate higher temperatures and isn't that hard to develop. Electricity might have advanced faster without fossil fuels.

Thanks! I hope that is indeed the case, and Happy Halloween!

@@isaacarthurSFIA this is the closest thing to a celebrity meet and greet ive ever experienced

In the Exploratorium art/science museum near me, there is an exhibit that has some fun with this. It's a drinking fountain built into a (perfectly clean) toilet bowl. It's fun to watch people struggle with the idea of using it.

@@asklingler lol, that's funny. Yeah, it's interesting how our brain sometimes struggles to override instincts and preconceptions with logic.

This is where I disagree with the video. While our disgust reflex is strong, the _things_ we react to are typically not very fixed. "Spit and polish" was meant literally. You put a final clean on metal, ceramic, and smoothed wood items, including cutlery and crockery, by gobbing on them and rubbing it in. Even many of Isaac's own examples of things we did in the past are things we find disgusting today, but were not only commonplace, but necessary to our survival and advancement. Carrying water inside an animal's stomach. Proper sausages (offal inside an intestine). Even just wearing animal skins... you preserve hides by urinating on them, otherwise they will rot. It's only fairly recently that leather tanners were able to stop buying human and animal urine to supply their industry. How about using faeces to fertilise fields? An essential part of agriculture for most of history. Disgust is highly mutable and adaptable. We have to learn what to find disgusting. Our fear of spit is, IMO, purely a learned response following the introduction of advanced hygiene following the Germ Theory of Disease. An entirely modern phenomena.

@@1FatLittleMonkey I agree, although alot of it is instinctual, a lot of it is also culturally influenced.

Why would it. Your body is mostly made up friendly bacteria. In your guts you carry actual waste and its disgusting. Everything about animal life is disgusting unless it's a plant such as tree. Such simple and clean life form.

at least so far as we know..i mean, its hard to have a control group and test group...when theres only 1 group on the planet. Plus, there may have been other factors in the decline of the neanderthal that we are not aware of. Anyway, its hard to fathom how and why at this point in time.

Your example of Neanderthals is total BS. There's not a falsifiable statement in there. It could be that homo sapiens overwhelmed them numerically, just as they were, without "advanced" weaponry or any special trait. Remember too, that most modern humans are 2-3% Neanderthals, so they DID succeed: theories of their decline have to be made relative to "pure" homo sapiens, not to extinction. The dragon example is a more solid point, but you could've even kept to primates and talked about gorillas, or any big mammal predator, but whatever... In the final example, "we survived only barely, in part due to our intelligence": while it's reasonable enough to guess intelligence helped, again you're stating it as fact when we don't know. It even in contradicts the last statement; sheer luck might have been much more of a factor in our survival than intelligence ever was. After all, it only seemed to make a big difference in the past few thousand years, out of at least 200,000. You're much too impressed with your own theories about what did and didn't happen to early humanoids. Get a grip on what there is evidence for, and when your fanciful theories are just that, instead feeding your ego with your own cleverness.

@@squirlmy neanderthals don't share 2-3% of our dna but vastly lower numbers and most of them are of european descent, so only a fraction of humankind has any neanderthal dna, they went extinc for several reasons but went extinct

The only problem is that even if our technology is rare, that won't be an answer to the fermi paradox. It's just hard to imagine it being so rare that it's only happened once, here on earth.

@@EmmaDilemma039 The point I was trying to get across was that just because you have inteligence doesn't mean you develop advanced technology, and that it's by any means a sure fire way to survive early on either. So it's just another one of those chances, to add in to the total stack of odds against technologically advanced life. First, what are the odds for life, complex life, and everything else? We honestly don't know. Then the odds for intelligent life, as we saw it took ages for the dinosaurs to die off and give us a chance for some intelligence builds on earth. And then even if inteligence comes around as a higher focus, the odds of it turning into technology wielding species seems like it could be quite low, first does said species have the ability to work with tools, can they use fire in their enviornment? Do they even have a need to start making and learning stuff (the dragon and partially the Neanderthal example I previously gave), and then even if they do have the need and see the benefit, is that going to be enough to make sure they don't die out from other changes? These aren't ever an excuse on their own, it's just about stacking the odds. Each time you lower the odds with another one of these steps/barriers, it is on top of all the previous ones, an exponential increase in difficulty for that one final goal to happen. For all we know life itself might be super insanely rare to start, or yes, it could be on millions of worlds out there, but inteligent life might just rarley ever get the chance over brute force, now a few thousand worlds, and of those maybe only a hundred had hands and safe enviornments to use fire and develop tools with. And then of those only a few survived incliment weather or other changes to their enviornment or predators with changing times. And of these few dozen left maybe only a couple who managed to previously survive were still weeke nough to really develop their technology very far within a million or so years. And now of these not yet one of them has survived the baking of their planet after they started breaking their ecosystems with advanced tech... (us included, not yet at least). This is the whole point, each one o these barriers with unkown actual odds, is still a possible barrier that stacks on the others resulting in that exponential decrease in the odds of something happening. So, it's not that "our technology is rare" that would explain the fermi paradox. It's that life itself that can make technology like ours for communication is rare, that could explain it. At any part in that chain, weather its the first of making life, the medium of having inteligence, or the later of making advanced technology, the issue can be at any of those steps and until we get out and explore our galaxy, kinda hard to really know what any of these different situations odds really are. We might find that life is a one in a billion worlds thing, or maybe its like every other star system has some bacteria. We just don't know so it's just guessing, but small changes in each of these can easily stack into having only 1 technologically advanced species in billions of worlds or so, throw in one or two more barriers, and that's trillions of worlds just like that quite possibly even at just a one in thousand odds each or so. We don't know, and I"m not claiming too, I was just putting forward some ideas on possible barriers some people might not think of. They won't explain it on its own, it's just that they are on more possible thing to stack into the giant list of possible barriers that may or may not explain the fermi paradox.

Refrigerators, microwaves, and stoves oh my!

Car

Those are, to a degree, covered more in other videos. His back catalog of videos is a wealth of Ideas and knowledge

@@UNSCPILOT I know, I'm just kidding I follow this channel since its beginning

reference?

they very well may be because thats just a made up number

Have you ever tried to work out these values in reverse for various fictional universes? I tried it with the star trek universe and it came to there being an intelligent species about every 22 lightyears. XD

The "R" sound is easier to say at the beginning of a word. I lived in Australia for three years, and by the time I left, I was pronouncing the "R" as "ah" much like Bostonian say. He says o-ah for the "R" I've only heard that in parts of Louisiana, but he not from there.

@@gyrateful He sais "rare". perfectly like with an R at the beginning and end.

When you realize that nobody really cares about your dunbar number if it is zero.

DiabloMinero it’s like the stock market

@@TravisSurtr if you've lost a bunch of money buying stocks, you'll start buying bonds instead?

Hell-o-ween.

@@hunam3876 I knew I might be missing something. Rarely seen it spelled anywhere!

It's almost sad how accurate that is

ain't that fuckin' truth...

Exactly! I think Nick Bostrom has made this same point.

@@jtinalexandria Great minds think alike, it would appear.

I think the video operates under the assumption that the amount of heavy elements in the universe is somewhat similar and that the sheer number of possible planets that are within the observable universe make it quite unlikely of a solution to the paradox.

If you are still alive after 2 years (😁), regional climate change probably had a lot to do with the transition. But don't expect me to be able to discuss that.

@@knewledge8626 climate change simply changes migration patterns, and is further proof that staying put is a bad gamble. Climate change has been happening for billions of years. It's not like it is some kind of modern man-made invention . . .

From Climate Stability and the Origin of Agriculture. "The relationship between climate and the development of agriculture has been widely discussed for many years by both the anthropology and climate scientific communities. Many competing views have been developed primarily based on studies of the archeology of the Near East (for a review see [4]). For example, it had been suggested [5] that agriculture appeared as a result of technological advances that gradually increased man’s ability to exploit the environment after man had occupied vast areas of the Earth. Certain conditions were found necessary for the development of agriculture [4] such as the technology for collection, processing, and storage of agricultural products and the presence of potential domesticates in the local environment. Examples included development of improved hunting technology by one group and perhaps experimentation with agriculture by another. The increased efficiency of hunting failed as a survival technique, but the experimenting with agriculture may have had more success, and when the stresses of the YD were removed, agricultural development was accelerated. Bar-Yosef [6] emphasized that the initiating event in this view was a response to the environmental stress during the YD. This same idea has been applied to the development of agriculture in China [7]."

@@knewledge8626 "Many competing views have been developed" -- I think that best sums it up :)

Thanks Sam!

@Mykel Hardin It was the greeks around 200bc, and yeah they did have very basic steam turbines, called an Aeolipile. I wouldnt go so far as to call it an engine though, it was incredibly inefficient and was more of a fancy demonstration, like automatons of the 1700s. It would be wild to imagine if they knew what great possibilities lie just within reach if they had continued tinkering with the tech

5, future filters are coming

@@jgr7487 must be channeling Douglas Adams.

@Jonathan Stiles If you trace the paths from the center where the little guy is, it only leads to dead ends.

@Jonathan Stiles I don't see an opening there. It kind of blends into the background, but I just see the wall of the head which is ten times thicker than the walls of the maze.

Hit the pause button dude, this ain't TV

@@ConfuzzledTomato oh i can't do that; it would be rude to all the other people watching the video

@@007kingifrit Is OK. We're on watching it for the 4th time already.

@@seriousthree6071 ok i may not know how Utube works or why we haven't upgraded to Vtube but I sure can math and this video has only been out for 50 minutes and that's not enough time to watch it 4 times

@@007kingifrit I have computer, Internet enabled TV, Android phone, Android tablet. Quadraphonic Vision!!!!! :P :P :P

The parallel in that case to a fear of fire is uncanny, especially considering stuff like coal or gas fire power plants actually have far more deaths on their hands, and the tiny handful of Nuclear Reactors that did fail were mostly old flawed designs that were built more to make weapons grade material than they were for safe long term power

Look, you just can't build power plants powered by evil spirits. Those curvy towers are definitely full of evil spirits.

Humans...

I hate this guy too!

1) Spider! 2) Uncanny valley 3) Moving like a stick insect creeping up on prey. Nope, Nope, NOPE!

Dude what

@@DanielFenandes Sorry, I am not a native english speaker. The climate does play an important role in the acceptance of knowledge and technology as one's survival depends on it.

@@MrTryAnotherOne Where is the source of this information?

@@DanielFenandes No source, just thinking about stuff. Imagine living in North European or North American / Canadian cooler climate. You don't survive there for very long or develop a 'higher' civilisation without a knowledge and technology whereas it would be much easier to survive in a temperate climate. IMHO that is the reason why it so long for Europeans to catch up to older civilisations.

The Arabic world advanced math a lot and there climate there were not severe

Alex villela are you really making fun of the guys speech impediment? Asshole

No, we would have died off loooong ago