[extropy-chat] Dark matter and ET

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

Robin Hanson wrote:
> 
> Robert Bradbury has posted on this topic many times on this list over 
> the years.  I've often played the role of critic in responding to him.  
> It is a subtle question what exactly the goals of alien civilizations 
> would be,

If their early AI researchers were anything like ours, I suspect mostly 
paperclips.

> and different goals lead to different computational 
> priorities.

I don't see why different computational priorities should affect the material 
prediction, valid for an extremely wide range of goal systems: that 
superintelligences should convert available matter into configurations more 
useful than stars, which generate massive amounts of entropy without 
performing any computations...

> Also, there is the question of why such aliens are not 
> trying to make use of all the stuff that we do see.

...but this objection carries against the Fermi-Paradox explanation for dark 
matter / dark-matter explanation for the Fermi Paradox; I agree.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence