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

[John K Clark]

Robert Bradbury Wrote:

> I'll point out that it is the triple-alpha process which fuses 3 4He
> nuclei that produces the carbon, which then is further modified
> to produce the N, O, S & P that most of life is based on.


But that process didn't have time to produce any of those elements in
those very old stars, we know this because we can observe those ancient
stars and we see nothing but hydrogen and helium, and in just the
proportions conventional Big Bang theory predicts. How are you going
to make a Jupiter Brain out of just hydrogen and chemically inert helium,
or even a bacterium, especially when evolution had almost no time to do
its work? And if Dark Matter were Jupiter Brains you haven't explained
why we still see evidence for Dark Matter even when the universe was
very very very young.

> You have a *real* problem here -- because I can conceive of doing it and
> explain how one would do it you have to resort to some real hand waving
> to explain why it hasn't already been done yet.

My problem is that I don't understand how ANYBODY could have
been around 13 billion years ago, less than a billion years after the Big
Bang, let alone someone who can substantially change the abundance of
elements in the entire universe while he's happily building Jupiter Brains.
And I don't understand why if ET started more than 13 billion years ago some
things in the universe, like this planet, still haven't been converted into
Jupiter Brains. It just makes no sense.

> at this point it would be hard for anything to push us back more than
> a couple of hundred years.


 Actually I think that's probably true but of course I can't be certain
there isn't some unimaginable roadblock that always trips up a
civilization before it advances beyond a certain point; I doubt it but
it's more likely than what you're talking about.

Is it really inconceivable to you that we are the first? Somebody has to be.

   John K Clark