[extropy-chat] evolution and bee tracheas

[The Avantguardian]

--- Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 07, 2006 at 06:13:32PM -0700, The
> Avantguardian wrote:
> 
> > As it is, I doubt that any apocalypse -
> technological,
> > asteroidal, or otherwise would put so much as a
> dent
> 
> Do you know any insects who can survive in molten
> lava?
> Or simply in water at 140 C, for that matter?

Unlikely hypotheticals aside, my argument operates off
of the 500 million or so years of natural history as
portrayed in the fossil record. Please see the
excellently informative insect evolution time-line at
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/ent201/content/diversity.pdf
for elucidation. Keep in mind that the width of the
shaded areas of the histogram represent the diversity
of species within given orders of insects. 

The horizontal lines most likely represent asteroid
impacts that presumably were era-ending boundary
events. Notice that each causes a bottle neck of
diversity within the various orders but MOST of the
orders survive and immediately afterwards blossom into
even greater diversity than before. 

The lower line represents the Permian-Triassic
extinction event, the greatest in the fossil record,
wiping out over 90% of species. It is believed to have
been caused by TWO impactors of aproximately 30 miles
in diameter that gave rise to the Wilkes Land crater
in Antartica and Bedout crater off the coast of
Australia. These impacts were thought to cause of a
chain reaction of hyper-volcanism, global warming, and
frozen methane release that wreaked havoc on the
biosphere but merely served to turn the world into an
insect paradise. Amusingly , the Cretacious-Tertiary
boundary event (a mere 6 mile wide asteroid) that
killed off the dinosaurs did not even slow the growth
of most of the insect orders notably the beetles, the
flies, and the bees/wasps/ants.

Then again none of these impacts boiled all the oceans
(let alone vaporized it to reach your figure of 140 C)
or turned all the land into molten lava. Something
that catastropic would probably require an asteroid
the size of Ceres at 500 miles wide. While such an
impact may wipe out the insects, it is probably sure
to wipe out any computers upon which AIs are running
and atomize all nanotech anyways. After all molten
slag is how they killed the Terminator in the second
movie. :)      
 
> > in the insect supremacy. Should self-replicating
> > misanthropic AIs ever manage to knock us off our
> 
> They don't have to be misantrophic, just uncaring.

It is hard to be hyperintelligent AND completely
uncaring. It would require a mental disorder bordering
on psychopathy. I am not a superintelligence yet I
pity the worms on the sidewalk after a rain.
> 
> > pedestal, I am rather confident that there will
> still
> > be cockroaches scurrying around under the
> Terminator's
> > metallic feet.
> 
> So if you strip-mine the planet for carbon, and nuke
> off the volatiles your cockroaches will scamper on
> bare rock, in a vacuum?

Unless these as of yet uncreated AI are designed as
nihilistic smart-WMD, they would have little motive to
do something like that. If smart humans are any kind
of model for superintelligence, they would not even be
fast replicators. After all, why would
hyperintelligent beings create more competition for
themselves by runaway procreation?


Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does." - Richard Feynman on QM

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