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

Robert Bradbury robert.bradbury at gmail.com
Sat Jun 24 23:26:29 UTC 2006


On 6/24/06, John K Clark <jonkc at att.net> wrote:
>
>
> 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'll point out that it is the triple-alpha process which fuses 3 4He nuclei
that produces the carbon, which then is further modified to produce the N,
O, S & P that most of life is based on.  So if I were an ATC in a hurry to
produce more material for computronium I would make a point of separating
out the 4He, dump it into a star, let it rapidly cook it into the heavier
elements, then haul those elements back out.  This is much more efficient
than dumping in the hydrogen with the He because that simply creates a
deeper gravity well that one has to haul the heavier elements out of to use
it for useful purposes.  So ATCs would have a policy of harvesting the He
and leaving behind the H which might later form stars with the abundances we
observe.

Have physicists ever looked at the problem from the perspective that the
universe we "see" is due to ATCs arranging things to breed the most useful
elements as rapidly as possible (i.e. universe element mixture optimization
strategies)?  I strongly doubt it.

You have a *real* problem here -- because I can conceive of doing it and
explain how one would do it you have to resort to some real hand waving to
explain why it hasn't already been done yet.

The fact that we have had several major wars in the last century and that
has not only not wiped humanity out but perhaps it might be argued
accelerated the rate of technology development would tend to argue against
"poof" and then the civilization destroys itself explanations as to why we
might be first.  In fact I've argued in a number of forums, including the
ExI list at various points in time, that at this point it would be hard for
anything to push us back more than a couple of hundred years.  The only
thing I can see that might manage that would be disaster that completely
boiled away all of the oceans and heated most of the atmosphere on the
planet to 40+ deg. C.  Those types of hazards are currently extremely rare.
So once you reach a certain level of intelligence, knowledge base and
technology (I'm guessing Bronze Age) then pushing one back to the bacteria
or fish stage becomes increasingly improbable.  (In the Bronze age the
"planet killer" had to hit a ~5000 year window -- at our stage the "planet
killer" has I would guess only a 20-30 year window before that can't stop us
from reaching the limits.)

Even a Dyson sphere admits infrared radiation.


A classical Dyson *shell*  would emit IR at 200-300K [1] which are
temperatures we very hard pressed to detect at any distance.  And Matrioshka
Brains would emit IR at temperatures just above the microwave background
temperature (3-4K) for thermodynamic efficiency reasons.  Minsky pointed
this out to Dyson at the Byurakan CETI conference in 1971 and while Dyson
did not completely agree (presumably because he was thinking along the
shells supporting life forms which required "liquid water") he did
acknowledge the validity of the point.

Robert

1. Dyson never said "sphere" and explicitly cited those temperatures.
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