[extropy-chat] Intelligent Design -- take *this*...

[Mike Hayes]

Do intelligent entities still argue incessantly about politics when they are
dismantling and reassembling planets?

On 12/20/05, Robert Bradbury <robert.bradbury at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 12/20/05, Hughes, James J. <james.hughes at trincoll.edu> wrote:
> >
> >
> > (1) ID could be by "natural" causation, i.e. superintelligence
> > (2) ID does not require irreducible complexity, only statistically
> > unlikely complexity
> > (3) A successful defense does not necessarily determine the strength of
> > competing hypotheses
> > (4) Indeed, proving the central proposition of statistically unlikely
> > complexity in the peer-reviewed arena is what is important
>
>
> Actually, the "statistically unlikely" argument is open to significant
> debate.
>
> The evolution of stars produces a *lot* of carbon which seems to be a good
> substrate for structures required for life.  Supernovas and other
> astrophysical processes seem to produce a lost of "organic" base materials
> (I'm sure Amara could provide a long list of organic molecules found in both
> life processes and interstellar dust.)  This is in part the entire area of
> exploration of the field of astrobiology (which has a large and growing
> "scientific" community).  Lineweaver's arguments point out that a
> significant majority of the Earth's in existing galaxies are much older than
> ours.  "Probability One" points out there are likely to be a *lot* of them.
> Minsky pointed out to Dyson 40+ years ago that the most advanced
> civilizations will radiate heat near the cosmic microwave background
> temperature (where it is very difficult for us to "see" them).  The
> experimental evidence for "missing mass" in the universe is significant and
> the theoretical physicists are having to bend over backwards to try an
> explain it.
>
> There is a significant case to be made, if you understand biology and
> astrophysics sufficiently, that there may be a *lot* of superintelligences
> in the universe and *we* may currently be the "statistically unlikely" state
> in the evolution of complexity.  "Life" may have a relatively hard time
> getting from ground zero to our level of complexity -- but once the
> singularity kicks in it goes rapidly from our state to the limits that
> physics will allow.  Humans (be they creationists or scientists) seem not to
> have fully grasped that yet.
>
> Indeed, the complexity of evolutionary processes may make it impossible to
> "compute" the likelyhood or unlikelyhood of various paths of development.
> To get the statistics for #4 (above) may in fact *require* that one run
> large numbers of actual experiments such as our solar system to get the hard
> data.
>
> People unfortunately have a difficult time making the leap from where we
> are now to the stage where planetary dismantlement (and reassembly) is
> simply one of the things intelligent entities can do (in spite of the fact
> that we have been doing just that (to a limited extent) since 1959 [e.g.
> Lunas 1,2 & 3 and Pioneer 4].
>
> Robert
>
>
>
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>
>
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