[ExI] Send in the dwarfs

Ben Zaiboc bbenzai at yahoo.com
Mon Mar 29 12:22:15 UTC 2010


I don't see canned monkeys in space as being any kind of a solution, except perhaps as a sop to those people who insist on remaining biological (and why wouldn't they be happy with remaining on earth in that case?).

The most realistic scenario seems to me to be the idea of sending out robotic probes equipped with the means of constructing routers and 'computronium' habitats for uploads.  Then the brown dwarfs become destinations, not just convenient slingshot-providers.  How much more room in the galaxy is there when you're talking about housing entire civilisations inside bean-can-sized habitats instead of massive constructs with biological support systems?  If you've read Greg Egan's 'Incandescence', there's a pretty good description of a galaxy-spanning megacivilisation with light-speed travel, that could exist right now, and we'd have no clue about it.  

Maybe there is no Fermi Paradox, no Great Filter, and the place is swarming with people.  The sky wouldn't look any different, and we'd stand an extremely slim chance of accidentally intercepting (and decoding) any signals between nodes. We already know about the problems with Jupiter brains etc., and it could be that they're just not worth doing.

Get routers up there, develop uploading tech., a Gamma-ray internet, and we might find there are more alien civilisations than we can shake a stick at, and room for plenty more.

Ben Zaiboc


      




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