[extropy-chat] Dark matter and ET

Mike Lorrey mlorrey at yahoo.com
Fri Jul 15 18:11:28 UTC 2005



--- BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Well, all things are possible, but some are more likely than others.
> A civilization whose goal is to colonize as far and fast as possible
> seems the most unlikely. Like, where is it? You only need one, ever,
> in the universe.
> 
> My view of any post singularity civilization is that it won't want to
> colonize the universe. These are not Star Trek type civs, with a
> bunch of cowboys jumping from star to star, having punchups wherever
> they go. How immature is that?
> We are not talking about Bush III's latest ten year plan here.

The more intelligent one is, the more important is ones sense of
playfulness. An important factor of immortality is that one takes as
long to mature as possible, and never give up ones youthful attitudes.
Stodgy curmudgeonly immortals don't last long, IMHO.

> These are nearly immortal beings, who have redesigned themselves to
> 'something wonderful', resource rich, developing who knows what down
> to the nanoscale level, meshed together in some kind of virtual web
> that we can only begin to guess at. Look at how upset web geeks get
> if they lose their broadband connection for a day. And you think it
> likely that a piece of these beings will cut themselves off for
> centuries to go to another star system?
> 
> It is even debatable whether they will remain long in this physical
> universe or start creating universes of their own. ;)

Its evident you didn't get the point of Eugene' joke. How do you know
what they'll do? I concede that the ultimate environmentalism for a
posthuman civ would be to stay on one's home planet and not mess up the
rest of the universe in its natural form, but realistically, if there
are more than one SI, then the differentiation of goals between them
(or even if there is only one SI, who is to say it won't have multiple
personalities with multiple goals, all the better to keep oneself
company through eternity).

Having read Charles Stross' 2004 novel, Iron Sunrise, though, I find he
presents a much more realistic picture, IMHO: in that, so what if there
is one SI? The Eschaton is the Eschaton, and thou shalt not fuck with
the timeline of It's historical light cone. Other than that, you can do
pretty much whatever you want. There is life after the Singularity for
everybody who doesn't happen to transcend, and there will be a lot of
such people. Whether it happens to be in the current universe
simulation, or in another one so as we can't tell the difference is
really irrelevant to the plot of the future. The SI might do everyone
the favor of warping 90% of us to other planets to cut down on the
risks of overpopulation and resource depletion here, or just make us
all think that happened when It really just disassembled planet Earth
into computronium and uploaded everybody. Whaddaguy.

Those who haven't read this novel, I highly recommend it. Charlie did
some good work here (attaboy, Charlie!)

Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com

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