Humans figured out rockets before steam engines and electricity. Rockets being invented in 13th-century China, while the steam engine was only invented in 1606 and made useful in 1712. Electricity has a much more complicated history, and you could make the case that it was discovered before either of the other two, or invented later.
Other people have mentioned that the metallurgy that was known in Britain at the time useful steam engines were developed was dramatically more advanced than what the makers of ancient stuff like the Aeolipile had.
A fun fact is that the reason we developed the metallurgy required to put high pressure gasses to work inside cylinders was in large part due to work on improving cannon manufacture.
Early cannons exploded a lot, but a cannon which occasionally explodes is a lot better at being a cannon than a steam engine that occasionally explodes is at being a steam engine. Having a "minimal viable product" for a cannon is much simpler than for a steam engine so they were able to iterate on the technology.
> Most likely the reason it remained a toy, rather than being put to productive use, was the abundance of slave labor.
This is something that get said a lot, but it misses technological and socio-ebergetic factors as well:
1. at that time metallurgy was very rudimentary, compared to how it was in the late 18th century. Most they wouldn't have been able to craft an efficient steam machine back then even if they tried very hard.
2. They also didn't use coal (I don't even know I'd they knew it), which makes fuel (wood) really expensive and also removes the self-reinforcing retroaction where you can use the steam machine to mine more coal and really contributed to the exponential nature of the industrial revolution.
If by steam engine you mean ‘kettle with no pressure valves mounted on an axle’, yes. But the aeolipile was in no way a functional engine that could do useful work.
Fails to simulate the speed of light, at least from what I can tell.
Should be some million years ago civilization starts, lives for thousands of years, goes extinct - but we never become aware of them. Most never send signals (radio or otherwise) strong enough for us to detect. Others did, but the signal hasn't reached us yet. Still others did, but the signals passed by before we developed the ability to detect them. Still others are reaching us now, but are so far below the noise floor we can't detect them.
The universe is large. You have to account for how slow the speed of light is when talking about the Fermi paradox.
I wonder how much that changes the final probability. I think the biggest piece is instead of both able to detect each other only one will (the other will probably be dead by the time the information gets back the other way) which halves the chances of detecting another civilization. Beyond that, given sufficiently short civilization lifespans vs the age of the universe they can randomly appear in and a relatively uniform rate of random occurrence, I don't think "a random civilization appeared x years ago x light years away for the timing to work out" actually ends up being any less likely than "a random civilization appeared at the same time". It feels like it should but really if you just take the chance it'd happen normally and say "well, there is an equal chance a civilization could have developed x years prior" you correct for the time for traversing the distance without changing the probability.
The main thing the speed of light prevents is a single civilization staying together as a galaxy sized empire.
>The main thing the speed of light prevents is a single civilization staying together as a galaxy sized empire.
It seems to me that, in principle, a ruling class could set itself apart from humanity and conduct the business of a galactic government -- ahem, a galactic enlightened dictatorship, with its own timing.
For example, Alice and Bob live on Trantor, and are employees of the Galactic Federation. They constantly travel [at the same fractions of the speed of light] to clusters located in different galactic hemispheres, and, thanks to almost identical rates of time dilation in their [perhaps carefully chosen] travels, they meet every weekend of their proper time. They live happily as a family in the headquarters of the government, to the rhythm of the passing of countless generations on the myriad planets of the federation.
The main issue with this is a week to the traveller crossing the galaxy near the speed of light still requires civilization to stay together for 100,000 years without them.
The second issue is it's not as attractive as it sounds. Travelling 1/10th the galaxy in a proper time of 5 days requires a trip of a constant 2400 G's. Maybe solvable once your civilization has already overcome the Fermi paradox (probably don't need bodies at that point) though.
Fermi wasn’t talking about detection when he came up with the paradox. There was no SETI yet. He did a back of the napkin calculation that a civilization could colonize the galaxy in 1 to 100 million years with sublight speeds. The galaxy is much older than 100 million years, so where is everyone? There’s been plenty of time for many civilizations to show up here.
Exactly. Life may not be unusual in the universe. But technologically advanced civilizations could be rare enough that we don't detect them due to distances in space and time.
Played it until I got at least 2 civs into being space-faring. Pretty fun :)
Although, if you want to keep playing the game without constantly going through a bunch of already dead civs, then you'll need to hide them (Did this via Tampermonkey):
excuse my javascript inexperience... since when did JS get a lambda style definition?! Am I just living under a rock! (hitl flight sims in c++ for my day job w/ no real JS exposure)
I'm not the parent commenter, but it's open source and on github and easy to run localy, unfortunately it requires installing Java and some deprecated Java application to even build it to have changes reflect and I'm not doing either of those things. I also don't know enough about un-minifying javascript to just change variables in the browser directly. maybe someone else here does.
I remember being frustrated/saddened enough to dive into source code to find optimal strategy, and I found that even with this knowledge game kept my interest:
- each "year"(second) each death reason rolls its probability. If civ survives, there's also per year chance of developing tech on its own. It's optimal to advance tech asap
- technologies and a couple of lategame events change these probabilities - usually by removing small chance of early reason and adding new higher chance for later reason. It's mostly optimal to develop techs in clusters that cancel most of each other out and advance self-tech chance.
- tech tree roughly separates into 3 ages: early (up to and including sailing), middle (up to and excluding "modern times" with biology, transistors and newspapers) and late
early tech has (1)writing+math+astronomy techs that don't give additional death chance in any combo, but increase tech chance - research first (2)agri+fish+tools and fire+construction, metal+sailing that have higher death chance when you have all but 1 or 2 of them than if you have full cluster - focus if self-tech triggers (also agri and fish before tools) (3)architecture->plumbing decreases death chance - focus
middle tech doesn't change death chance, so you have a breather
late tech is most deadly - (1)taxonomy->germ->genetics tech branch has great death decrease on 2nd step, but last one gives high chance of bioweapon death (so don't. you'll fear self-tech doing it too); (2)exploding nukes event increases world war death chance, world peace event decreases it; (3)Ai is great danger but necessary - do it as late as possible (iirc there's like 1/3 chance of death on these last 1-2 steps)
When you learn all the numbers it becomes a great "tension - breather - tension" game, but still not with that high of a winrate. Nearby supernova death having a chance all the way through is kinda funny
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fun fact - I learned math behind Markov Chains just solve this game. Civs have like 1e-12 or 1e-15 chance of survival on their own, iirc (it was something very small, I don't remember now)
Only sad when you can seriously believe the various scenarios that play out...like teaching fishing could cause a civilization to cease to exist. It's a silly game that has no bearing on reality.
a) empathy has no reason to only work in reality - or whole genres of fiction wouldn't exist
b) it's hard to judge what's possible or not without experimental data (on otherworldly civilizations), nor we're even explained the mechanisms of "us teaching others". But it's a schematic way of showing Great Filters in a simplified, gamified manner - and that's still a possible, valid and argued for answer to a Fermi Question
> b) it's hard to judge what's possible or not without experimental data (on otherworldly civilizations), nor we're even explained the mechanisms of "us teaching others". But it's a schematic way of showing Great Filters in a simplified, gamified manner - and that's still a possible, valid and argued for answer to a Fermi Question
Exactly, the whole discussion is already extrapolation for sample of 1. Who knows how civilization would develop if we were more like bonobos less like chimpanzees.
It’s fun, but some of the Civilization deaths are kinda dopey. I mean, sure, a Gamma ray burst from a local supernova is gonna wipe ‘em out, fine. But an old culture that has mastered metallurgy dies because of an out of control cooking fire? Lol ok.
Yeah, but wouldn’t the sparks from lightning or other natural causes preclude any civ (or even life) from forming if the atmosphere is highly flammable?
Fun game! My personal answer to the Fermi paradox is that multi solar system civilization is very very hard, and multi galaxy civilization is functionally impossible. Speed of light is slow, space is big, and resources are concentrated. If there is a species with the capability to spread through their entire galaxy, they aren't in this galaxy and they aren't close enough to reach us.
Mine is they got too advanced and went multidimensional. Sticking to 3D is very primitive thinking when you can manipulate higher dimensions. Primitive 3d species will always think to conquer 3d things.
We know enough to know that macroscopic higher demential spaces connected to our apparently 3 dimensional space aren't a thing.
Having limits to our understanding doesn't mean all things are equally possible.
For instance there aren't any 2 dimensional beings because it's impossible to slice a mathematical pure plane and have macroscopic objects exist in that plane even fields surrounding a singular atom exist in 3d.
For sure, what I mean is they could be playing with different universes. Or found a way to manipulate time. It’s crack pot stuff but it all looks like it till it happens. Show a cave man an DJI drone being controlled and sending back live videos, they will also say it was impossible due to their understanding
and I like the name.. Epitaph. Because when I switch tabs and I go back to it after 10mins, there are civilizations that came and went and I/we didn't even notice.
An epitaph (from Ancient Greek ἐπιτάφιος (epitáphios) 'a funeral oration'; from ἐπι- (epi-) 'at, over', and τάφος (táphos) 'tomb')[1][2] is a short text honoring a deceased person. Strictly speaking, it refers to text that is inscribed on a tombstone or plaque, but it may also be used in a figurative sense. Some epitaphs are specified by the person themselves before their death, while others are chosen by those responsible for the burial. An epitaph may be written in prose or in poem verse.
It'd be interesting if there was an energy model in the back end of this. With fire making more energy available to the the Civil until it ran out of fire wood etc
I love stuff like this. Is your universe simulator something you've shared publicly? I'd be interested in playing with that as well, and seeing how you put it together!
I enjoyed the game! There was a whole lot of civilizational collapse due to food-borne illness. Maybe throw in a comet strike, or more varied geological changes (flipping magnetic poles, ice-ages, tsunami, sea-level rise, etc...).
It's incredible to think about how many cataclysms humanity has lived through, yet also how many we have been lucky to avoid (so far...)
I'm depressed. They all die. I suppose due to the name of this game, there are no chances of surviving for any of them.
... permanent colonies on worlds other than Fratlat. Although still largely unable to travel outside of the Latbûut system, the distribution of Fratbac civilization across multiple worlds greatly reduces the risk that they will collapse due to any crisis of merely planetary scale.
In 3904, a swarm of self-replicating Fratbac nanobots began to replicate uncontrollably, devouring vast swaths of Fratlat at a rate which Fratbac scientists had formerly deemed impossible. After several days of rapid expansion, the swarm seems to have become dormant, but not before consuming approximately 5% of the entire mass of Fratlat and rendering Fratbac civilization completely extinct.
This is super fun. I've been playing for 40 min now. I have seen civs wiped out by military AIs, nuclear war, volcanoes, forest fires, and more. Others seemingly continuously prosper. Cool stuff, thanks!
Why do you need to teach any of these civilizations fire and toolmaking? These are pre-civ capabilities. Toolmaking is natural for the species you even not considering being sentient. Like birds for example. Usage of fire is somewhat different but it would be learned naturally by the any sentient species.
Also, where are the probabilities for mass-extinction-event-volcanic-eruptions are coming from? It looks like they are very likely to happen ... I have 8/10 so far...
That's a great way to get cooked inside your rocket by blueshifted cosmic rays. You'll arrive at your destination ready to eat, a kind of cosmic jerky sent by the gods.
Space is filled with cosmic rays, mostly protons, going in all directions. Most of them have energies under 10 GeV (99.6% c). But if you start racing through that flux at a very high speed yourself, their velocity relative to you will be boosted in the direction you're traveling, and you'll briefly see a high-energy particle beam coming through the windshield before your eyes are cooked.
If you get going really, really, really fast, a similar thing happens with the blue-shifted cosmic microwave background.
Thinking of Jean-Luc's hobby (alien archaeology) it would be interesting to discover planets that were already dead (?). I mean once we have fast-enough probes roaming the galaxy, it could happen that we discover a long-lost civilization.
Also, pretty funny to see civilizations that figure out rockets before e.g. steam engines and electricity.