[ExI] deep space again, was: RE: riots again

[Alfio Puglisi]

On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 8:44 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

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> *From:* extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:
> extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On Behalf Of *Alfio Puglisi
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] deep space again, was: RE: riots again****
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> On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 7:25 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:****
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> Here's the photo:
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> http://www.space.com/17755-farthest-universe-view-hubble-space-telescope.htm
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> >…Doesn't this photo make the Fermi paradox even more problematic?  Given
> the ginormous number of stars out there, and given that, once you achieve
> interstellar capability, extragalactic adventure is not that far away (i.e.
> the distance to Andromeda is only 20x the diameter of our Milky Way, and
> what's an order of magnitude between friends?), why don't we see even a
> damned single photon out there that even remotely smells artificial? The
> more we know about the cosmos, the more puzzling this problem becomes…Alfio
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> Alfio, how many postcards have you written to Aboriginal pen pals in the
> Australian outback?  Neither have I.  During Extro5, I kept starting one,
> but more interesting immediately adjacent conversations kept distracting
> me, and furthermore I kept being overwhelmed by the fact that I don’t know
> where to send the card, I don’t know their language, I don’t know their
> customs, I have no clue how to even start to explain to them the very
> basics they must understand to even vaguely grok what it was we were doing
> there.  Even I only vaguely grok what we were doing there, with decades of
> preparation.  The Australian aboriginals have never received a single
> postcard from me, even though the cost to send one would be minimal.
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But even someone who has always lived in the Australian desert, or in the
middle of the Amazon rainforest, can see planes in the sky and boats in the
water, and would recognize a postcard for something out of the ordinary.
The problem is not only radio silence, but also the lack of artifacts or
any sign that, at the stellar scale and over, things do not simply follow
the laws of entropy. A telltale sign of life on Earth is chemical
disequilibrium: something is actively keeping the atmosphere out of
balance, filling it with oxygen. Skyscrapers and airplanes are the same:
someone is working to hold them up, and they would revert to their
"natural" state quite readily if the upkeeping ceased.
It seems quite obvious that, for some reason, technology does not reach
megascale proportions. I don't know, maybe when you get to the scale at
which self-gravity is significant, it might be hard to go on. Or the
intervention is subtle enough that what we think is an untouched landscape
is in fact a byproduct of it. Or maybe there's no general need for such
wide scale activity, for reasons we still have to discover. Who knows.

Alfio
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