[ExI] The Great Silence again

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 10:59:49AM -0700, Keith Henson wrote:

> They don't even build shells around their stars and dim them to IR.
> At least not that we notice so far.

There have been multiple screens for Dyson blackbody emitters since.
All of them are pushing the boundary low and lower.

And, again, this is what is expected. Why would invididual
cultures change their own origin system, and then stop? If they
didn't stop you would never have happened. Difficult to
observe anything if you're not there.

That SETI is suspended is not that big of a deal. It's
merely a hedge against something unexpected.
 
> That was the first thing Eric Drexler went looking for when he figured
> out how powerful nanotechnology could be.

You don't need machine-phase to build circumstellar node
clouds, but it definitely helps.
 
> High computational speed and the low speed of light may result in some
> rather small civilizations.  More than a few hundred nanoseconds may

No, they will result in a huge canvas of culture cells. Just as
today's Earth, only much, much larger.

> by way out on the edge of things.

You know what, your neurons operate on ms range, yet
you're across the world and we're using an asynchronous
communication channel that is read in minute do day
latencies. And patches of ecosystems only interact at
the edge. Most of the organisms are stationary, and only
signal. Few will travel, and those that travel will
be light, unless you come embodied, relativistically.

So you're describing the geometries of the cell
edges, not assemblies of cells. These are vaster
than empires, and more slow. There's world enough,
and time.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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