[ExI] They're Made out of Meat

[Keith Henson]

That was my conclusion years ago. If what we see is aliens, it is
evidence that they lived through their local singularity.

The reason I worked through the math was the tentative observation
that 20-some odd stars in a 1000 light year radius of Tabby's star
were exhibiting blinking as well. The AIs say if what we see is
aliens, they have been in space for 3000 years, making the expansion
about 1/3 of the speed of light. The closest one is 511 ly from us. So
if we see Vista being turned into a massive data center, we should not
be surprised.
Having a space-faring civilization that close is really unlikely. If
true, it has good points and bad ones. Good that it shows life can get
through their singularity, bad in that we have competition.

Keith

Keith

On Sun, May 24, 2026 at 12:15 PM Gregory Jones <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:
>
> Keith if that is what is causing Tabby's star to dim, that would be wicked cool.  Certainly it would serve as evidence our murderous species can survive multiple existential threats.  spike
>
> On Sun, May 24, 2026, 11:42 AM Keith Henson via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>> Thinking about uploads, the light dip we see from Tabby's star could
>> be a data center supporting trillions of uploaded aliens. It is, if I
>> remember right, over a light second wide. (I posted the math here
>> years ago.)
>>
>> Keith
>>
>> On Sun, May 24, 2026 at 10:31 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat
>> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > On 24/05/2026 16:04, Jason Resch wrote:
>> > > I agree that ither life forms can be made that need not be biological (once bootstrapped by biological intelligence). But can you envision any self-emerging intelligence that doesn't go through a biochemical stage in this universe?
>> >
>> >
>> > The 'They're Made out of Meat' story doesn't say anything about the machine* life having emerged without a biological precursor.
>> >
>> > I would imagine that naturally evolved biological life is relatively easy in this universe, intelligent life much less so, but pretty much necessarily based on biology at first, then non-biological (or rather 'post-biological') intelligent, deliberately designed life arising from that, and who knows what beyond that.
>> >
>> > *Yet again, the language we use is probably doing us a disservice, 'machine' having the connotation that it's completely distinct from biological, when this is not very useful, or true. We are all machines already. One day, if we don't destroy ourselves, we could be superbiological, or postbiological, machines, instead of biological ones. Even if everybody eventually uploads into some kind of computronium computing substrate, we'll still need a physical presence in the physical world, and I doubt that it will be like our current clunky robots.
>> >
>> > --
>> > Ben
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > extropy-chat mailing list
>> > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>> > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> extropy-chat mailing list
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat