[extropy-chat] Dark matter and ET

[Damien Sullivan]

On Sun, Jul 17, 2005 at 07:04:15PM +0100, BillK wrote:

> Are you making the even more unlikely claim that we are the first, or only? 

"Even more unlikely" seems like assuming your conclusions.  If one believes in
expansionist civilizations then we pretty much have to be the first
civilization in our light-cone; if we weren't we wouldn't be here, or we'd be
obviously in some sort of preserve.

Being first is unlikely if one thinks that there could be millions of
intelligent species in the galaxy.  If one thinks there could only be one
naturally intelligent species, because it then colonizes the galaxy like
bateria in a Petri dish, preventing anything else from arising, then our odds
of being first are 1/1, not 1/million.

Remember that many biologists these days think the creation of life is
relatively easy, since it happened so early; certainly easier than eukaryotes
or multicellular life were.  But nonetheless there's just one root to the tree
of life, because whatever did get established spread through the oceans.

> > > colonize the universe. These are not Star Trek type civs, with a bunch
> > > of cowboys jumping from star to star, having punchups wherever they
> > > go. How immature is that?

Maturity is sitting on one's butt?

> > > These are nearly immortal beings, who have redesigned themselves to
> > > 'something wonderful', resource rich, developing who knows what down

Resource rich until someone wants to build a Tipler cylinder.

> > > to the nanoscale level, meshed together in some kind of virtual web
> > > that we can only begin to guess at. Look at how upset web geeks get if
> > > they lose their broadband connection for a day. And you think it
> > > likely that a piece of these beings will cut themselves off for
> > > centuries to go to another star system?

Web geeks aren't all of modern civilization.  More representative in the US is
urban sprawl and bigger houses, the desire for living space.  And some people
want to get *away* from other people, to be with nature, or to live on their
own resources and feel self-sufficient.  Assuming that post-Singularity minds
will be all web geeks and no survivalists seems odd to me.

> Why switch to talking about bacteria and kudzu? I doubt if they have
> the capability to colonise the galaxy. I am talking about
> post-singularity intelligence which can redesign itself. Immortality
> is one obvious result.

But what values will be used for the redesign?

Even if it were true that the most intelligent and "mature" beings would be
web geeks, addicted to bandwidth, that would not preclude other beings which
were technological but precluded by their deep structure from redesigning
themselves away from spreading and colonization.  They'd be the 'kudzu'.  If
superintelligence doesn't reproduce, evolution will select against
superintelligence.

-xx- Damien X-)