[ExI] Past and current extropy topics

[William Flynn Wallace]

Evolutionary psychology is another topic.  It's interesting that a 10
year old paper I wrote is still seeing a lot of downloads.

Would you please provide a link for your paper?  Anything on psychology I
would be interested in.  bill w

On Wed, Nov 16, 2016 at 2:25 PM, Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20161116/dfef78c0/attachment.html>