I was talking to a friend yesterday and the topic of grabby aliens came up. This, in turn, preempted the post I was working on. Grabby aliens render the question of when Venus lost its oceans (in the event that it had them in the first place) into the realm of the provincial and the mundane. I wrote an oklo.org post about grabby aliens a few years ago, and one can, of course, study the Astrophysical Journal paper in detail.

There’s something about the candy-crush colors of the flagship grabby aliens diagram that is appealing, but it is also remarkably effective in the way that the figure telegraphs the vast and epic sweep of the Cosmic Struggle for control:

Time proceeds downward. Grabby aliens stochastically emerge at various spots in the visible Universe, and as soon as they emerge they spread out in all directions, steamrolling everybody that they encounter; it’s the opposite of the and the meek shall inherit the Earth.

The diagram indicates that when one set of grabby aliens encounters another set of grabby aliens, they permanently maintain a tense standoff in the co-moving frame. The universe undergoes a phase transition from free-to-be-you-and-me to a cosmic web of Panmunjoms and 38th Parallels. I would have naively thought that the lines of demarcation would have more of a fractal structure as competing grabbers interpenetrate and contest ever smaller parcels of the interstellar gulfs.

Another remarkable conclusion that appears to flow from the diagram is that the Universe is bequeathed with some sort maximum aggressive potential. This quantity — perhaps a Carnot-like thermodynamic optimum of information processing and PdV work — must thus ultimately proceed from fundamental physics. The figure suggests that every space-like separated grabby set-up that emerges is immediately endowed with this perfectly efficient maximum contesting power. This brings to mind a thermodynamic system that is quenched from a homogeneous state into a broken symmetry phase, which, in turn, suggests the relevance of phase ordering kinetics in systems undergoing a phase transition. (For some light reading on the topic, see here).

Consulting Google this morning, I see that we’re currently scheduled for The Singularity in twenty-one years.

From what I can tell, the singularity would provide all of the necessary and sufficient conditions for a giant cluster of H100s running a souped-up pre-trained model to graduate into the Grabby Aliens club, especially if it’s of the “Vinge’s rapidly self-improving superhuman intelligence” variety. That motivated me to predict a super-short outlier time frame on the Metaculus Grabby Aliens question.

Looks like I have some significant deviation from the consensus (I predicted 19.4 yr in 2021). The Metaculus crowd tends to adhere to the Toby Ord philosophy, and that school of smart money is predicting that we’ve got a comfortable 171.5 billion years before we need to start vesting up.