[ExI] Where’s my body’s Control Panel?

[Dan]

--- On Mon, 4/13/09, John K Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> "Dan" <dan_ust at yahoo.com>
> 
> > It's conceivable, e.g., that humans could've started
> settling space or
> > other planets decades ago -- in other words, long
> before they could
> > seriously attempt something like a body control
> panel.
> 
> That may  be conceivable to you but it isn’t to me.
> Certainly talking about
> “decades” is completely inappropriate when talking
> about the sort of
> thing where even 50 million years is just a blink of an
> eye.
> 
> I think the fundamental difference between you and me is
> that I think
> intelligence is capable of engineering the galaxy and
> perhaps the universe;
> you don’t.

That's a strange conclusion to get from my above statement.  I don't believe that at all.  My point was rather that what you seem to believe is that technological progress goes at some rate for most or all intelligences and along a fairly specific path for ditto -- such as humans developing a body control panel before they move out into space.

> If I’m right then a blind man in a fog bank
> could detect the
> existence of ET. So where the hell is he? It seems to me
> that either we’re
> the first or there is a hidden disaster of some sort that
> slaps down all
> intelligent races when they get too smart. Perhaps that
> hidden disaster is
> the control panel, or to call it by another name drug
> addiction.

I think it's possible, but I'm not sure it's likely.  The problem with most of the filter talk is you need a filter -- i.e., something that filters out all the ETIs -- that works in a huge %age of cases or you end up with ETIs or evidence of ETIs all over the place in short order.  Since the data doesn't support this, yes, there must be some filter -- whether humans were the first or intelligence always self-destructs or whatever -- but this particular filter -- which has been proposed in other varieties before -- could only work if almost all ETIs embrace it before they start out to cause changes humans might notice.  (Settling space is merely one possible change humans might notice -- simply because if the process starts one might imagine one ETI kind (species?) in this galaxy settling the whole galaxy in short order.)  Don't you agree?

Regards,

Dan