by psadri on 7/1/24, 4:10 PM with 9 comments
Imagine you are a member of a interstellar species and know about 1000's of civilizations. You want a 3 metric tuple that best captures the technological/societal/environmental state of that civilization at a glance. What 3 metrics would you choose?
Some ideas:
[ ratio of highest earner / min wage, smallest feature they can manipulate (eg: nanotech), fraction of speed of light they can achieve ]
[ # of wild species inhabiting the planet, total energy consumption, FLOPs for fastest computer ]
Note that these are somewhat skewed towards advanced civilizations. Perhaps there are other metrics that are applicable across a wider range of development.
by dave4420 on 7/1/24, 5:15 PM
I’m not sure how applicable it would be to a hive mind species.
2. Power consumption as a proportion of total power emitted by their home star. Broadly captures technological development.
3. Fertility rate, counting only children who live to sexual maturity, with some adjustment for the number of sexes / sex ratio. Broadly captures how easy life is, at least after a certain level of development.
I’m not confident that 1 and 3 would even make sense in principle for all civilisations. And I’ve completely missed environmental considerations.
by solardev on 7/1/24, 8:11 PM
For example, if you measure income inequality, that presupposes a currency-driven labor market (as opposed to societies organized like ants and bees, or clonal organisms like some plants or siphonophores).
If you measure energy consumption or net primary productivity, it presupposes earth-like metabolism and industrial processes that derive useful work from stellar output. It's possible to imagine fusion-based civilizations, or highly efficient ones that have learned to manipulate gnomes and geological processes to suit their needs, but those wouldn't really be fairly captured by a crude measure of watts or calories.
Same with FLOPs, which is already a vague enough number even for human computing usages (with different outcomes / use cases requiring many different types and numbers of calculations), and makes things like analog or quantum computing harder to measure.
=====
I wonder if there's something more basic, like the ratio of information output (some unit of abstraction over various kinds of outputs, not only bytes but things like genomes and writing and music and art and other useful arrangements of energy and matter) divided by the energy available in a certain radius (a solar system? galaxy?) over time.
That lets you measure both ecological and technological outputs, allowing comparisons between humanlike societies, robot ones, fungal ones, maybe even geological ones (sentient volcanoes?), etc.
by throwaway211 on 7/3/24, 12:24 AM
by silisili on 7/1/24, 4:56 PM
If I could cheat and use bit twiddling to combine some into the same number, I'd probably like to capture things like average temperature, number of species, etc.
by admissionsguy on 7/1/24, 5:01 PM
by bjourne on 7/1/24, 6:05 PM
by paulcole on 7/3/24, 12:46 PM
Possibly too broad but non-old-age death due to lack of resources (food, water, medicine, shelter, etc.) compared to surplus/deficit of those resources.
Attempting to show whether as a society we have the ability to stop those premature deaths and whether we’ve chosen to do so or not.
Maybe then also NEET (not in education, employment or training) relative to poverty rate? High NEET, low poverty means that AGI very likely exists. High NEET, high poverty means society is in trouble. Low/high means people are struggling to get by. Low/Low means things are likely somewhat efficient?