[…] in any kind of singularity event. I always envisioned that an Omega Point event would leave behind nothing but a wrecked husk of a world, or a de-syncrhonized Dyson Swarm. Jonez however is suggesting that singularity does not necessarily have to be a world changing […]

We don’t need nukes or super viruses to eliminate ourselves.
Look at our civilization and try to find something that does work without electricity.
There’s a novel called Blackout by Marc Elsberg, mainly about some people stuck in a Europe-wide blackout and working as electrician it’s amazing to see how little people know about their surrounding. Almost everyone takes electricty for granted and doesn’t realize that it’s not only the lights and freezer needing some…

The other question, would be how many species would have some sort of cataclysmic event before the singularity, as we ramp up the technological development, new forms of warfare that could potentially wipe life out (atomic on mass scale, or something like anti-matter or something we havn’t even postulated at). Or fear as the singularity approaches, and the likelyhood of religous based doomsayers. Or some sort of “super bug”. Or even run away climate change, at a rate greater then the needed development of tech.

What if the “more stable universe” you mentioned would be what Christianity calls Heaven? After all, after the end of our world (false-vacuum collapse?) God is supposed to create an entirely new world – that is, a new Universe.
I find this amusing.

I always thought that looking for extra terrestrial civilizations sending radio waves is just plain silly. It’s very unlikely that we would catch a civilization in that very short frame of time when they blast radio waves into cosmos. It’s just 100-200 years of radio activity, compared to the age of universe it is no time at all.
What we should be looking for is mega-structures like dyson swarms, it all comes down to computational power, we are quickly approaching point at which we will be able to simulate universes for ourselves, when we will be able to do that then the real universe becomes boring backwater where only weirdos like me would find anything interesting to do. The question is whether we will need bigger and bigger computers, if we do then we should look for stars that are dimmer than they should be due to mega-structures, if not then it’s practically impossible to detect the other civilizations.

I find your explanation of the Fermi Paradox interesting. It reminds me of Charlie Stross’ explanation in Accelerando: the more advanced a civilization gets the more computationally dependent it becomes and hence it has a greater incentive to stay near its home star (where the energy and matter to power computation is abundant) rather than branch out and explore strange new worlds. There is one point I’m skeptical about: I’m not entirely convinced that technological evolution is a requirement. I feel like it would be possible for a civilization to become stagnant: be content with their level of advancement and stay there instead of jumping on the road to the Singularity. There’s an Isaac Asimov story (I can’t remember the name) which posits that neolithic agrarian societies are one such stable point. The story centers around what happens humans stumble across a far more intelligent alien race that’s at that stable point. The astronauts inadvertently kick-off a technological explosion by introducing them to the ideas of science and technology. The aliens then go on to develop in a matter of months what took humans thousands of years.

@ Shrutarshi Basu:

Good catch. I’m fixing it before everyone else gets here. :P

*Fermi Paradox. After Enrico Fermi.