[ExI] Past and current extropy topics

[Keith Henson]

If you want a summary of what was discussed back in the early days of
the list, it's hard to beat Charles Stross's Accelerando.  He was on
the list, might still be for all I know.

Computronium, Matrioshka brain, planet disintegrating, it's all there.
Even the exchanges between Hans Maravec and me about the merits of
cryonics vs authors being reconstructed from their works was turned
into a plot element toward the end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain

The current topic is that we might have seen one of them.  Tabby's
star radiates no excess IR in our direction, and the light from this
star has dimmed by 15 percent in the last 100 years, not counting the
huge dips Kepler saw.

Are we looking at something natural or are we looking at an alien
megastructure?  A few months before the first paper on KIC8462852, I
published a design that just happened to radiate the waste heat from a
power satellite solar north/south.  Observers looking edge on at a
system full of these would not see the IR.  If you make the case that
aliens are dimming the star, what are they doing with the energy?
Even making the case that the power satellite band is only blocking 1%
of the star's light, that's a lot of energy.  What could they be doing
with it?  At 3% per year growth in energy, use, how far does that put
them ahead of us?

Perhaps aliens have another way to cope with waste heat.  In theory
you could dump it down a black hole.  We don't think the universe is
filled with Dyson spheres because we don't see a lot of IR.  But it
aliens have a way to get rid of waste heat besides radiating it, that
could be the answers to the missing mass problem.

If this isn't enough, there is a group that claims to have seen
spectral shifts in the Sloan data for a couple of hundred stars in
classes similar to that of the Sun.  They make a case that the cause
is big lasers and that it might be attempts to communicate in ways
that make it cheap on the receiver end.

I have argued that the natural course for intelligence is to speed up,
which has the effect of inflating the distances between stars beyond
reason.  Still, if this is the background cause for what we see out
there, why are there no exceptions?  I.e., why are they not here?  Is
the physics that restrictive?

It's a topic which seems to have little interest here but the whole
business of moving into space  was, long ago, an extropian topic.  I
think there are only two people who are on this list and power
satellite economics.  Now there is a chance that (as a solution to
energy and carbon) it might be done.

Evolutionary psychology is another topic.  It's interesting that a 10
year old paper I wrote is still seeing a lot of downloads.  Could a
political political party be based on EP?

Finally, are we living in the base reality or a simulation?  This
isn't exactly an extropian question though it has been discussed here.


Best wishes,

Keith