[extropy-chat] When did intelligence first emerge intheuniverse?

John K Clark jonkc at att.net
Sat Jun 24 20:39:11 UTC 2006


Robert Bradbury Wrote:

> Have you personally *ever* been to an "oldest star'?

No, I've never been to the Great Wall Of China either but I believe it
exists, I've seen pictures of it, and I've seen pictures of stars as they
were 13 billion years ago. These may not be the very oldest stars but they
can't be far from it, the Big Bang only happened 13.8 billion years ago.

> instead of there being "oldest" stars there are a bunch of carefully
> arranged light sources surrounding our solar system that are arranged to
> look like oldest stars

Maybe, and maybe God created the world 4 thousand years ago and buried
dinosaur bones and made them look hundreds of millions of years old to fool
us. Or maybe God created the universe 30 seconds ago complete with memories
of me as a child. Maybe, I can't prove it's untrue so maybe. But probably
not. It is far more likely that something we can not even guess at always
destroys a civilization before it gets really serious about engineering the
universe, or maybe we're just the first, after all somebody has got to be.
I'm hoping for the second possibility.

> You are assuming that I believe the observations are "natural".

I am assuming that the entire observable universe is not a practical joke
set up by a cosmic buffoon to make us look stupid; and if my assumption is
wrong and He doesn't want me to know about it then I never will so there is
no point in fretting over it.

> But even assuming that are you are also assuming things like an unbiased
> use of stellar material as resources.
>  If MBrains happen to have a preference for stars with He4 (perhaps for
> making Nbrains) then our observed element abundances are going to be
> biased in that high deuterium stars

Even if ancient ET's had a fetish for an inert gas like helium I don't see
why they'd want to convert deuterium to it, helium was one of the few things
that was already available at the time. You had hydrogen and helium and
maybe a very small amount of lithium and that's it, you can't make much with
that, in fact even nature can't make much with that except stars, I don't
see how life could even get started with building blocks that crummy,  and
even if by some incredible miracle it did it wouldn't have time to evolve to
the point where it got into the Jupiter brain business,

> I didn't say that life evolved in the first few hundred million years.

Well we can observe that era with our telescopes and Dark Matter still
existed then, so whatever it is it can't be made of Jupiter brains; assuming
it's all not just a stage set with stars painted onto cardboard.

> at 0.01c it only takes 10 million years to take a galaxy dark.

Even a Dyson sphere admits infrared radiation.

John K Clark






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