[extropy-chat] fermi's paradox: m/d approach

[Spike]

> Subject: RE: [extropy-chat] fermi's paradox: m/d approach
> 
> Spike wrote,
> > ...another explanation for the cosmic silence: we 
> > aren't worth the mass to send us signals.  I will call this 
> > argument the M/D approach to Fermi's paradox.  It works like this...
 
> Although I have always assumed that we just haven't 
> discovered the galactic internet yet...

The internet is a useful metaphor in the M/D model.  We
are nodes, each of us.  Before the internet, we had
face to face communications, publications in magazines,
scientific conferences and personal letters available
as communication devices.  But when the internet came
along, the distance between us suddenly decreased by
orders of magnitude, which brought together such wonderful
examples of spontaneous order as extropians, the math and
science chat groups, the parallel computing efforts and
so on.  The M/D suddenly decreased to the point where
I personally found it worthwhile to spend a large percentage
of my free time exchanging memes online.  

>  Our sub-light speed communications are too 
> slow and weak.
> Anybody actually communicating over interstellar distances 
> would be using
> faster-than-light speeds if possible, so we don't know how to 
> read their
> signals yet...  Harvey

While recognizing this as possible, I am always interested
in examining the grim possibility that the speed of light *really is*
the cosmic speed limit, for everyone everywhere always, forever
and ever, amen.  {8-[

Another scary thought is the possibility that there really 
isn't any magic physics yet to be discovered: that we have
found most of the important limits already, and that they
really are universal limits.  The whole M/D approach to
Fermi's paradox depends on this pessimistic supposition.  

Of course I am eager to be talked out of it, or to be given a 
feasible alternative such as Harvey's we-are-on-the-universal-
spam-blocker-list notion.  However I must say that I find
little comfort in the suggestion that Earth is the
galactic Nigeria.

spike