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

[Lee Corbin]

Samantha writes

> On Jul 5, 2006, at 5:14 PM, Lee Corbin wrote:
> 
> > Russell writes
> >
> >> My guess would be that a newly colonized and initially mostly
> >> empty star system may be receptive to further immigrants, but
> >> as it fills up it will start putting up "migrants please move
> >> on to the next empty star system" signs. (Historical analogies
> >> would be the recolonization of Krakatoa by plants and animals
> >> after the eruption, and European immigration to the colonies
> >> in America and Australia - in each case as niches are filled
> >> the barriers to further immigration become higher.)
> >
> > My guess goes quite contrary: moments after a Von Neumann type
> > probe lands on a planet---a probe incidentally which was designed
> > and sent by a vast superhuman intelligence---it rather quickly
> > takes over the entire surface of the planet. It also rather
> > quickly bootstraps itself up to being able to receive the
> > latest algorithms from home, including, especially importantly,
> > the very "soul" of its originator.
> 
> Even if it is already occupied?  If so then such a probe would be an  
> act of aggression and might trigger an interstellar war.  Latest  
> algorithms at c?   Hmm.

You think that just because a nanotechnological device lands on
a planet and tries to convert it to its own tissue, the present
inhabitants might go so far as to regard this as WAR?  Surely,
you are over-reacting.  Don't most species look forward to 
assimilation?

Kidding aside, well, "war" has happened before. I guess you could
call what I do to the microbes in my laundry war, in a sense.

> > In that way, the initiating intelligence gets a copy of itself
> > going in almost no time. No further pellets are either welcome
> > or necessary. Within [a short time period], they themselves
> > (any incoming pellets) are hopelessly far behind the technology
> > ruling the planet's surface.
> 
> So these probes are only light hours

Sorry, I ought to have said "days" or possibly even weeks

> from home base?   Otherwise it  
> is quite possible that later waves are more advanced than the new  
> information presumably somehow beamed all the way from home.

Yes, you're right, and I agree. But I was talking about the eventual
situation. No, given the huge distances involved, it is unlikely
that a probe will reach a planet on the heels of another, and it
is more likely that a more advanced one overtook a more primitive
one far from the target system.

> Is home beaming individual coded updates in all directions it has
> probes?

I imagine so.

> > Soon, as the planet begins to think for itself (assuming my
> > postulated radius "r of entity integrity" is that large),
> > one of the main question on its mind is what to do about
> > incoming *signals* from the home world. Those distant worlds
> > survive in a certain evolutionary sense if they are receptive
> > only to incoming algorithmic EM that does not threaten their
> > already established identity.
> 
> So another species that was bright enough could fake updates to these  
> probes to gradually have them do their own bidding or take them over?

My own guess is that the encrypters will have the upper hand
from now on. But yes, what you say here could be another
aspect of the arms race.

To be precise (the way I see it), suppose that stars A and B have
both been colonized by pellets from Earth, and perhaps have even
been receiving EM updates. Still, a mutation of one may provoke it
into sending amended versions of itself to B and to others, in a
form of rebellion.

Suppose that this mutation (or algorithm discovery, however we look
at it) is so profound that not only does A take over B, but it
establishes a radius of a few hundred light years where it rules.
But at some point in its own expansion, it begins to encounter
planets suborned by Earth---the closer it gets to Earth---that
are a match for its own now far-distant probes.

(Again, both *centers* are dozens or hundreds of years more advanced
than their peripheries.)

Lee