[ExI] fermi paradox

[spike]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-
> bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John K Clark
...
> 
> I am assuming nothing I am just making an observation, I observe that the
> universe has not been engineered and I find that puzzling if intelligence
> is
> common. If we are not the first then I can only conclude that something
> puts a lid on brain power and prevents it from erecting large scale
> structures. I can speculate but I make no claim to know what that
> something is, it could be that no human mind could understand it.
> 
>  John K Clark


We have discussed scenarios here that would allow for the existence of large
scale structures that are not easily detectable from earth.  An example
would be an S-brain, which is similar to an M-brain.  The S-brain consists
of jillions of tiny individual nodes, but instead of an enormous diaphanous
sphere enveloping a star, they would form a smaller (but still diaphanous)
sphere that orbits some distance from the star.  

Imagine a metal-poor star system in which the only large object is an
earth-sized rocky planet at one AU.  An intelligent species could transform
that one object into a cloud of nodes still orbiting at 1AU but not in one
enormous sphere enveloping the star but rather a sphere perhaps couple light
seconds in radius.  So it is a thousand times the diameter of the original
planet and one billionth the original density, so some of the star's light
would pass thru the object.  It would still be tiny with respect to the star
of course.  Unless earth happened to be on the orbital plane of the original
planet, we could detect its presence only by the small gravitational wobble
of the star.  But for an earth sized planet at one AU, that would be
exceedingly difficult to detect.

All of the exo-planets currently known are too far away to verify that they
are not already S-brains.

spike