[extropy-chat] When did intelligence first emerge intheuniverse?

[Robert Bradbury]

On 6/24/06, John K Clark <jonkc at att.net> wrote:
>
>
> >From the light spectrum of the very oldest stars, stars that are almost
> as
> old as the Big Bang itself.


Point 1: Have you personally *ever* been to an "oldest star'?
If you have not, and you are choosing to "trust" the data is valid, can you
make a case that there is no way, given "valid" laws of physics, that the
data, e.g. the photons at specific frequencies, cannot be "rigged"?  I.e.
instead of there being "oldest" stars there are a bunch of carefully
arranged light sources surrounding our solar system that are arranged to
look like oldest stars?  I'm not asking if you think this is probable.  I'm
asking if you think it is *impossible*?

if it is *not* "impossible" *and* you accept Lineweaver's conclusions, you
have to completely invert the foundation upon almost all astrophysics, and
even a lot of basic physics is based.  I.e. instead of assuming with
99.999999...% probability that the Universe is dead and *all* observations
should be based *only* upon natural laws you have to assume with ~70%
probability that the observations could be "rigged" and the observations
should be giving equal time to "natural" and "artificial" explanations.  (
i.e We do *not* have exoplanets, we have "thingys" which seem to be
producing wavelength or magnitude shifts due to their large masses.)

Whether the observations are "rigged" or not is an interesting discussion
and involves getting inside the 'minds' of brains operating at the limits of
physics, with lifetimes of trillions of years who might very well become
"bored" and want to play with the Universe.

(In some respects this gets into Seth Lloyd's perspective that the Universe
is nothing but a big computer -- the question comes down to whether or not
there are 'minds' which use it as a substrate to run programs.)


If dark Matter is made up of Jupiter Brains
> then it's made up of ordinary baryonic matter, then the early universe
> must have been much denser than we though and nearly all the deuterium
> would have been converted into Helium 4 in the first few seconds of the
> Big Bang. Instead we find lots of deuterium in those ancient stars,
> just the amount you'd expect to see if Dark Matter were not normal matter.


You are assuming that I believe the observations are "natural".  But even
assuming that are you are also assuming things like an unbiased use of
stellar material as resources.  If MBrains happen to have a preference for
stars with He4 (perhaps for making Nbrains) then our observed element
abundances are going to be biased in that high deuterium stars are those
which they leave behind as having been unworthy of energy expenditure for
harvesting at this time.

And some of the stars we look at are so old, formed just a few hundred
> million years after the Big Bang,  that it's difficult to believe any sort
> of life could exist on them much less a civilization that's building
> Jupiter
> Brains. For one thing there was very little carbon or metals back then,
> they came later from supernovas.


I didn't say that life evolved in the first few hundred million years.  I am
aware that in classical nucleosynthesis you are going to need time for the
heavy elements to build up by going through the S- or R- nucleosynthesis
pathways.  But as I pointed out to Eugen, current theory argues that
position in the galaxy and proximity to the right supernovas to seed a solar
nebula are viewed as being more important -- particularly when we are
talking 6-8 billion years *after* the evolution of those elements, of which
carbon is probably the most essential, to play around with the mix before
you start the ~4 billion years to "intelligent civilization" clocks ticking.

But  at 0.01c it only takes 10 million years to take a galaxy dark.  If you
assume a mixed population of "natural", partially-engineered and
"completely-engineered" galaxies you get a universe which is much more
explainable than hand waving involving "dark matter" that the best
explanations involve *undetectable* particles.  Now what seems more like
"fantasy" -- undetectable particles or a universe semi-developed by
intelligent civilizations?  We *have* evidence that intelligent
civilizations can exist -- we have little or no evidence that undetectable
particles can or do.

Robert
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20060624/5da7ed38/attachment.html>