So, I was thinking, where are the cold alien intelligences who ought to be out there, studying us dispassionately, as if we were microbes...?
Well, what if we accidentally killed them all?
No, really.
See there has been this flap about the LHC destroying the universe....
Now, it could happen, like if it actually made a Higgs and triggered a vacuum phase transition or something (yeah, blah blah - ultra-high energy cosmic rays hitting the moon ought to have c-o-m collision energies comparable to LHC collision energies, even given the GZK cutoff, so why hasn't that destroyed the universe, eh?
Patience, grasshoppers. Patience.)
But the LHC hasn't, 'cause it keeps breaking, and how likely is that.
Well, not very. One word: Swiss Engineers!
So, clearly the LHC does usually work, and promptly destroys the universe sometime in the first septillion collisions.
But, there are finite odds it won't - so the many worlds have some finite subset of branches where the LHC always breaks, and we live to blog
The LHC breaking is survivor bias.
It is anthropic selection in a many worlds multiverse. No need to invoke time travel or such.
But - if LHC operation really is astronomically catastrophic - somewhere between GRB level energies sterilizing the Alpha Quadrant, and global phase transition superluminally destroying this patch of the universe - well, then we are killing a lot of aliens each time.
Potentially intelligent aliens.
They couldn't be really intelligent, or they'd realise our intentions and have agents in place to sabotage the LHC each time, and that'd be silly - they'd have to also have infiltrate Congress 18 years ago to scupper the SSC, and how silly is that!
Or, they'd be doing their own collider experiments.
Uh-oh.
Alien bastards! You killed us all!
Billions of times over, all across the multiverse.
Don't you know when to stop?!
So... us being here, with a broken LHC is really unlikely, in this scenario.
Like 1/(oompteen kazillion) unlikely.
But, if there was even one comparable alien civilization anywhere within range, they'd be doing their own experiments, and the odds of the LHC failing and the Alien SuperColliders also failing, well the odds of that are 1/(oompteen kaziliion)2 !
That is not very likely.
So, we conclude that if the LHC breaks, and we live, then the conditional odds are very low that there are any other technologically advances alien intelligences anywhere in our patch of the universe.
So the Fermi Paradox is solved: it is just anthropic selection - anyone unlucky enough to share our branch of the multiverse has been annihilated oompteen kazillion times over by our krazy experimenting with forces We Do Not Comprehend...
QED.
Best of all, it is falsifiable - if either the LHC operates without catastrophe, or alien intelligence is discovered, then there is no problem.
Oh, and we don't care about UHECR hitting stuff and destroying the universe.
Let them.
As long as there is a finite branching probability for any given collision that the universe is NOT destroyed, then by anthropic selection we necessarily reside in the low probability branch of the multiverse which is not destroyed,
Cumulatively the probabilties get very low, but the selection is very strong, so there is always a finite probability of us being here.
Very wasteful, in terms of destroyed universes, but then there are a lot, in this scenario.
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This also has implications for the cosmological constant problem... Every day we are causally disconnected from more and more of the universe, so we are only capable of destroying a small fraction of the universe each time we turn the LHC on. But likewise, we are saved from intelligent life in other parts of the universe as they destroy their causally disconnected region.
Put simply, in universes without cosmological constants, spontaneous phase transitions have a much greater chance of destroying us. The size of our event horizon hints that these transitions occur ~1/Hubble Time!
Good point.
In fact this may select anthropically the approximate value of Lambda.
The multiverse truly is an economical hypothesis. Explains a lot ;-)
It does anthropically explain the non-zero value of lambda.
For economic purposes however, one need only design a quantum gun that strongly couples losing money on the stock market and death. This way, you only live when you make money. In the multiverse model, all those who die during stock market crashes are really richer for it...on average.
That is somewhat reminiscent of Tegmark's wager.
But, it does leave a moral issue in survivor bias, in that you leave your dependents poorer on average.
The iterated economic quantum gun could be interesting - since in a zero-sum market there have to be losers for all winners, and if they all have quantum guns...
Might be a strong selection for non-zero sum trading systems...
Or inflation, if "make money" is sloppily defined.
I guess we now find out if Goldman Sachs reads blogs...
I specifically had Tegmark's wager in mind. But he has tenure, and has no use for more money.
Also, if one of the LHC failures is due to the PI's pancreas leaping out of his mouth to splat down on the "Emergency Reset" button, I would accept that as supporting your hypothesis.
Steinn,
This argument is a lot like the old joke (which I first heard in a Laurie Anderson performance) that the odds of there being a bomb on an airplane are something like one in a million, but the odds of there being TWO bombs on an airplane are more like one in a trillion, and that therefore to insure your safety, you simply have to bring your own bomb onto the airplane.
@Bob - nah, that is too wildly improbably and painful.
All you need is the failure of a previously inspected vacuum weld, or an improbable multi-hit by cosmic rays on critical control electronic.
@Ben - no, it is a little bit like the old joke.
It is more like a bomb squads searching a plane finding a bomb and deciding to not finish the sweep because the odds of a second bomb are so low.
The many world hypothesis is wonderfully economical if considered from the right angle, ya know.
So, I was thinking, where are the cold alien intelligences who ought to be out there, studying us dispassionately, as if we were microbes...?
Well, if anybody bothered to actually study the anthropic physics for about five seconds... then they'd know that the Goldilocks enigma explains that all life elsewhere in the universe is at approximately the same level of technological development as we are:
http://evolutionarydesign.blogspot.com/2007/02/goldilocks-enigma-again…