[extropy-chat] In the Long Run, How Much Does Intelligence Dominate Space?

Russell Wallace russell.wallace at gmail.com
Fri Jul 7 04:43:34 UTC 2006


On 7/7/06, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at tsoft.com> wrote:
>
> Russell writes
>
> > ...what I said: that as a star system fills up, it would seem
> > likely to start posting "any further immigrants please move on
> > to the next empty star system" notices.
>
> Well  :-)  that's a bit more polite than just shooting them
> down without saying anything, I guess.


If you can say it with flowers, you can say it with X-ray lasers :)

It seems all round more efficient to say it with words, though; dogs bark
more often than they bite, men say fuck off more often than they swing
fists, nations send diplomatic messages more often than cruise missiles, not
because angels come and tell them to be nice but because it's just plain
more efficient that way. Not obvious to me that that won't remain true in
the future.

More seriously, however, I posit the following structure to a
> mature galaxy:


Mostly seems plausible enough. Doesn't mean it'll actually happen that way
of course - history says we'll all be surprised if we live - but most of it
sounds plausible. Except for one quibble:

2. assuming that this radius is on the order of a light year
>    then (following Dyson and Bradbury), stars are shrouded to
>    extract maximum energy, or (Criswell) stars are altered
>    to maximize long term gain, or (me) stars are novaed to
>    get the mostest soonest (why waste resources on the
>    future, anyway?  seems to me to be a characteristic idea
>    of humans who are familiar with very limited tech)


Nova'd? Assuming you can do it (collide enough suns and I suppose you'll get
something that'll go boom), that a) wastes 99 point yea nines percent of the
energy, and b) kills you with rad damage so you waste the rest too. Don't
see the gain there even if you don't care about the future. (And hey,
weren't you the one going I'm going to live a trillion years, better make
plans for that? Aren't you the one who ought to care about the future?)
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