[ExI] Silence in the sky-but why?

[Tomaz Kristan]

spike,

I agree with what you have just said. It very well could be, that small
lizards are just waiting for us mammals to die out. Then they will continue
as they used to, back in good old times before the KT event. It's possible
that they will never become very intelligent, they will just die out
sometimes later, when the Earth will become a lifeless planet (again).
Until then, they will exercise the New Jurassic.

It's a small opportunity window for us now. Before the dark will fall again.


On Sun, Sep 1, 2013 at 4:44 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 *Tomaz Kristan
> *Subject:* Re: [ExI] Silence in the sky-but why?****
>
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> >…The most common line of thinking goes something like this:"You know,
> the Universe is soooo big, even the Galaxy is sooo big, that there MUST be
> intelligent life out there!"…Well, as has been said here before, it's not
> THAT big...Looks like it isn't!****
>
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> We must recognize that as mind boggling as the thought may be, it is a
> possible explanation for the silent sky: we really are the first ones
> here.  If true, this generates a line of thought even more astonishing.  If
> we are the first tech enabled species in the galaxy, then this whole thing
> is ours, all of it, but there is a catch.  We need to hurry.  Reasoning: we
> model intelligence as an ever upward climb towards more and better, but it
> is not necessarily so.  Humanity is accumulating knowledge at a high rate,
> but our collective intelligence may or may not increase in the long run.  I
> can easily imagine mechanisms which would cause average intelligence to
> decrease.****
>
> We may be at, or nearing, or possibly even past, the peak average
> intelligence of our species, depending on how it is measured, and that last
> phrase is very important.  I know we have these IQ tests and performance is
> going up.  But we may be fooling ourselves.****
>
> We tend to wait around for nano-santa to show up, but he may not.  Robust
> nanotech might happen and not kill us, but it is speculative.  We have a
> number of technologies we conceive, as a class could be called PS^2B^2, for
> Pie in the Sky in the Sweet By and By.  But if we really ponder, we have a
> technology I call P^2DN^2 for Potatoes on the Plate in the Dirty Now and
> Now.   An example of the latter would be the primitive MBrain nodes I
> sketched in a post a few days ago.****
>
> If we look carefully, we could conceive of an MBrain that could be
> conceivably constructed using all technology that is either current or is
> on the immediately foreseeable horizon, using technologies understood and
> mastered already.  This is important in the possible outcome of a gradually
> declining ability of humanity, which is one possible future (not the one I
> consider most likely, but a possibility.)  We could conceive of an MBrain
> which would start tugging the sun towards another star, which is a
> necessary prerequisite to some earth-based life form colonizing the galaxy.
> ****
>
> spike****
>
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